The Language of Flowers

1.

I would go back to the blue room; I would have the baby within its watery walls. I knew this in the same way I knew that Grant was looking for me, without evidence and without doubt. Grant didn’t know the location of the blue room, but he knew enough to find it, I was sure. Until he had given up, I had to stay away. It could take months or most of the year. I was prepared to wait.

No longer squeamish in the presence of intoxicated teenagers, I moved back in to my garden in McKinley Square. I had a knife and a sexual past. They couldn’t attempt anything that hadn’t already been done, and, looking at my reflection in a gas station mirror, I doubted anyone would try. Feeling numb toward both my changing body and my homelessness, I didn’t change my clothes, didn’t seek out showers or wealthy neighborhoods. The weeks began to show on my skin.

I missed Renata, and missed my job, but I couldn’t go back to Bloom. It was the first place Grant would look for me. Instead, I hid under the heath bushes, which had grown and multiplied in my absence. The seeds of heath could exist in the soil for months or years—decades, even—before bursting forth new life, and the familiar plant comforted me as I curled up with Grant’s duffel bag beneath its branches. The rest of my things I left in my car, which I moved to a different street every day. If Grant saw the hatchback, he would recognize it—even with the license plate removed and the blue box well hidden under my belongings—so I kept it far from Potrero Hill, in Bernal Heights or Glen Park, sometimes as far as Hunters Point. I had been sleeping in the park for weeks before it dawned on me that I could sleep in my car at night. But I didn’t want to. The smell of the soil, saturated from overwatering, entered my dreams and calmed my nightmares.

In mid-August, perched at the top of the play structure in McKinley Square, I spotted Grant. He was coming straight up Vermont Street, climbing the hill with his eyes scanning the modern lofts and old Victorians. He stopped and exchanged words with a painter on slanted scaffolding. Turquoise paint dripped from a brush and landed on a drop cloth near Grant’s shoe. He reached down and touched the wet paint, then called something up to the painter, and the man shrugged. Grant was three blocks down the hill, and I couldn’t hear his words, but I could see he wasn’t out of breath even after the steep climb.

I scrambled through the bushes, zipped my bag, and pulled it across the street and into the corner store. When I’d first moved back to McKinley Square, I’d told the store’s owner I was running from an abusive family. I asked him to hide me if my brother ever came looking. The owner had refused, but as time passed and I purchased every meal from his always-empty neighborhood store, I knew I would not be turned away.

The owner looked up when I ran in with my heavy bag and quickly opened the door behind him. I raced around the counter, through the door, and up a flight of stairs. Dropping to my knees, I crawled to the front window of the small, sparsely furnished apartment. The hardwood floor smelled like lemon oil and felt slick against my shins. The walls were painted bright yellow. Grant would not look up twice.

Crouching low under the bay window, my eyes peered over the sill. Grant had already climbed the stairs to the park and passed the swings, the empty seats swaying in the breeze. He spun in a circle, and I ducked down. When I lifted my head again, he stood at the edge of the grass, where thick green sod met the wild forest undergrowth. He pressed a boot into the trunk of a redwood tree before walking across the soft layer of duff and kneeling in front of the white verbena. I held my breath as Grant looked around the sloping hillside, afraid he would notice the carved-out heath bush and the outline of my body, belly round, beneath it.

But he didn’t pause at the heath. He turned back to the verbena and bowed his head. I was too far away to see the delicate clustered petals in which he dipped his nose, too far away to hear his hushed words, but I knew he was praying.

My forehead pressed against the glass, and I felt my body being pulled toward him by the strength of my own desire. I missed his sweet, earthy smell, his cooking, and his touch. The way he placed his square palms over each side of my face as he looked into my eyes, and the way his hands smelled of soil, even after they had just been washed. But I could not go to him. He would make promises, and I would repeat his words because I wanted to believe in his vision of our life together. But over time we would both find my words meaningless. I would fail; it was the only possible outcome.

Closing my eyes, I forced my body away from the window. My shoulders fell forward, belly pressed against parted thighs. The sun warmed my back. If I had known how, I would have joined Grant in prayer. I would have prayed for him, for his goodness, his loyalty, and his improbable love. I would have prayed for him to give up, to let go, and to start over. I might have even prayed for forgiveness.

But I didn’t know how to pray.

Instead, I stayed as I was, folded over on the floor of a stranger’s living room, waiting for Grant to give up, forget about me, and go home.

2.

“Six months,” Elizabeth said.

I watched Meredith drive away. After visiting weekly for two months, she had finally decided to set a new court date. Six months away.

Elizabeth slipped an extra strip of bacon into a sandwich and set it in front of me. I picked it up, took a bite, and nodded. She hadn’t given notice, as I’d expected, but she was different than she’d been before the failed adoption, nervous and apologetic.

“The time will go quickly,” she said, “with the harvest and the holidays and everything.”

I nodded again and swallowed hard, wiping my eyes, refusing to cry. In the time since our missed court appearance, I had replayed scenes from the year before in my head endlessly, looking for clues to what I had done wrong. The list was long: cutting down the arm of the cactus, hitting the bus driver over the head, and more than one declaration of hatred. But Elizabeth seemed to have forgiven me for my violent outbursts. These, she seemed to understand. I’d come to the conclusion that her sudden ambivalence was because of my growing clinginess, or else my tears. Feeling my eyes well again, I shut them and folded over, my forehead pressed against the table.

“I’m really sorry,” Elizabeth said quietly. She had said it hundreds of times in the previous weeks, and I believed her. She seemed sorry. What I didn’t believe, though, was that she still wanted to be my mother. Pity, I knew, was different from love. From what I’d heard of their conversation in the living room, Meredith had made my options clear to Elizabeth. I had her or I had no one. It was out of a sense of obligation, I decided, that Elizabeth hadn’t given notice. Finishing my sandwich, I rubbed my hands clean on my jeans.

“If you’re done,” Elizabeth said, “wait for me on the tractor. I’ll clean up and meet you out there.”

Outside, I leaned against the tall tire, surveying the vines. It was turning out to be a good year. Elizabeth and I had thinned and fertilized in just the right amounts; the grapes that remained were fat and starting to sweeten. I’d spent all fall working beside Elizabeth on the vineyard, writing three-paragraph essays on seasons, soil, and grape growing; memorizing field guides and plant families. In the evenings, just as I had the autumn before, I accompanied Elizabeth on her tasting tours.

I checked my watch. We had a long night of tasting ahead of us, and I was anxious to start. But Elizabeth didn’t come, not after five minutes, and not after ten. I decided to go back inside. I would drink some milk and watch Elizabeth finish cleaning the kitchen.

When I reached the front porch, I heard her voice, half angry, half pleading. She was on the phone. All at once I realized why Elizabeth had kept me waiting by the tractor, and just as suddenly I realized that the failed adoption was not my fault. It was Catherine’s. If she’d shown up, if she’d responded with words or flowers, if she hadn’t left Elizabeth so alone, everything would have been different. Elizabeth would have gotten out of bed and tightened the ribbons on my dress and driven us to court, Grant and Catherine in tow. Filling with rage, I stormed into the kitchen.

“I fucking hate that woman!” I shouted.

Elizabeth looked up. She moved her hand to cover the mouthpiece. Springing forward, I ripped the phone out of her hand. “You fucking ruined my life!” I shouted, and then slammed it against the base. The call disconnected, but the phone bounced off the hook, hitting the hardwood floor and then dangling an inch above the ground. Elizabeth folded her head into her hands and leaned against the counter. She appeared neither surprised nor offended by my unexpected outburst. I waited for her to speak, but she was quiet for a long time.

“Victoria, I know you’re angry,” she said finally. “You have every right to be. But don’t be mad at Catherine. I’m the one who messed up. Blame me. I’m your mother—don’t you know that’s what mothers are for?” The corners of her mouth turned up slightly, a wry, tired smile, and she met my gaze.

Squeezing my hands into fists, I rocked backward on my heels, begging myself not to attack her. Even in the height of my anger, I understood that above all else, I wanted to stay with Elizabeth.

“No,” I said, when I’d calmed enough to speak. “You’re not my mother. You would have been, if Catherine hadn’t ruined my life.”

Storming over to the stairs, I was startled by a flash of motion out the front window. A truck sped up the driveway. In profile, I saw Grant hunched over the steering wheel. Brakes squealed and gravel flew as he parked in front of the house.

I sprinted upstairs at the same time Grant pounded up the front porch. At the top, I leaned against the wall, out of sight. Grant didn’t knock and didn’t wait for Elizabeth to come to the door.

“You have to stop,” he said, out of breath.

Elizabeth crossed the room. I imagined her standing in front of him, only the screen separating their bodies.

“I won’t stop,” she said. “Eventually, she’ll accept my forgiveness. She has to.”

“She won’t. You don’t know her anymore.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Just that. You don’t know her.”

“I don’t understand,” Elizabeth whispered, her voice barely audible over a persistent tapping. It sounded like Grant’s foot on the porch, or his knuckles on the frame of the screen. The noise was nervous, impatient.

“I only came over to tell you to stop calling—please.” There was silence between them.

“You can’t tell me to forget her. She’s my sister.”

“Maybe,” Grant said.

“ ‘Maybe’?” Elizabeth’s voice rose suddenly. I could picture her face flushed, hot. Had Elizabeth been stalking the wrong woman? Was Grant even her nephew?

“All I mean is, she isn’t the sister you knew. Please believe me.”

“People change,” Elizabeth said. “Love doesn’t. Family doesn’t.”

There was silence again, and I wished I could see their faces, to see if they were angry, or indifferent, or on the verge of tears.

“Yes,” Grant said finally. “Love does.” I heard footsteps, and I knew he was leaving. When his voice reached me again, it was from far away. “She keeps filling jam jars with lighter fluid. Lining them up on the kitchen windowsill. Says she’s going to burn down your vineyard.”

“No.” Elizabeth did not sound shocked or afraid, only disbelieving. “She wouldn’t do it. I don’t care how much she’s changed in fifteen years. She wouldn’t do that. She loves these vines as much as I do. She always has.”

His truck door slammed. “I just thought you should know,” he said. The engine started, a quiet hum, and it idled there, in the driveway. I imagined Grant’s and Elizabeth’s gazes meeting, each searching the other for the truth.

Finally, Elizabeth called out to him. “Grant?” she said. “You don’t have to leave. There’s leftovers from dinner, and you’re welcome here.”

Wheels turned in the gravel. “No,” he said. “I shouldn’t have come, and I won’t come again. She can never know.”

3.

I waited a second month, and then a third, just to be certain, slipping rent under Natalya’s door when it was due. By the end of October, the nausea had lessened. It returned only when I didn’t eat enough, which was rare. I had plenty of money for meals. Grant’s cash and my own savings would have kept me well fed throughout my pregnancy, but I knew I wouldn’t have to wait that long.

As the leaves fell, I became sure that Grant had given up. I imagined looking through the windows of his water tower and watching him box up the romantic poets and cover the orange box with an opaque cloth, the calculated actions of a man with a past to forget. And soon, I told myself, he would forget. There would be many women at the flower market, women who were more beautiful, exotic, and sexual than I would ever be. If he hadn’t already found one, he would. But even as I tried to convince myself, Grant’s image passed through my mind, his hooded sweatshirt pulled low over his forehead. Not once had I seen him look up at a woman passing his stall.

The day I felt the baby kick for the first time, I returned to the blue room. I lugged the duffel bag across the city to my car and drove to the apartment. Letting myself in the front door, I carried everything up the stairs in three trips. Natalya’s door was open, and I stood over her bed, watching her sleep. She had recently dyed her hair again, and the pink had rubbed off in streaks on the white pillowcase. She smelled like sweet wine and cloves, and she didn’t stir. I shook her awake.

“Has he come?” I asked.

Natalya covered her eyes with her elbow and sighed. “Yeah, a few weeks ago.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Just that you were gone.”

“I was.”

“Yeah. Where’d you go?”

I ignored her question. “Did you tell him I was still paying rent?”

She sat up and shook her head. “I wasn’t entirely sure the money was from you.” She reached out and placed her hand on my stomach. In just the past few weeks, I had gone from looking fat to looking undeniably pregnant. “Renata told me,” she said.

The baby kicked again, its fingers and feet pressing into my internal organs, scraping the walls of my liver, my heart, my spleen. I gagged and ran into kitchen, throwing up into the sink. Dropping down to the floor, I felt the nausea ebb and flow with the motion of the baby. I thought I was past the sickness of early pregnancy; I also thought I had overcome the urge to vomit every time I was touched. One of my two assumptions was inaccurate.

Renata had told Natalya. If she had told Natalya, there was no reason to think she hadn’t told Grant. I climbed my way up the kitchen cabinets and threw up into the sink a second time.

There was a new sign in the window of Bloom. Shorter hours, closed on Sundays. When I arrived in the early afternoon, the storefront was dark and locked, even though the sign said it should be open. I knocked, and when Renata didn’t come, I knocked again. The key was in my pocket, but I didn’t use it. I sat down on the curb and waited.

Fifteen minutes later, Renata returned, the silver tube of a wrapped burrito in her hand. I watched the light reflect off the aluminum and onto the walls of the buildings she passed. I stood up but did not look at her, even when she was standing directly in front of me. My eyes studied my feet, still visible beneath the curve of my stomach.

“Did you tell him?” I asked.

“He doesn’t know?” The shock and accusation in her voice pushed me backward. I stumbled off the curb and into the street. Renata steadied me with her hand on my shoulder. When I looked up, her eyes were kinder than her words had been.

She nodded to my stomach. “When are you due?”

I shrugged. I didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. The baby would come when it did. I would not see a doctor, and I would not give birth in a hospital. Renata seemed to understand all this without me having to tell her.

“My mother will help you. And she won’t charge you anything. She considers it the work for which she was put on this earth.” I could hear Renata’s words coming out of Mother Ruby’s mouth, her accent thicker and her hands on my body. I shook my head.

“Then what do you want from me?” Renata demanded, her frustration escaping in short, punctuated words.

“I want to work,” I said. “And I want you not to tell Grant—that I’m back or that I’m having a baby.”

She sighed. “He deserves to know.”

I nodded. “I know he does.” Grant deserved a lot of things, all of them better than me. “You won’t tell him?”

Renata shook her head. “No. But I won’t lie for you. You can’t work for me, not with Grant asking me every Saturday if you’ve returned to your job. I’ve never been a good liar, and I don’t want to learn now.”

I crumpled onto the curb, and Renata sat beside me. When I checked my pulse underneath the wristband of my watch, the beat was imperceptible. I couldn’t get another job. Even before getting pregnant, the likelihood was slim, and it would be impossible in my current, increasingly visible, condition. The money I had saved would eventually run out. I wouldn’t be able to feed myself or buy whatever it was that made children so infamously expensive.

“Then what will I do?” My despair became anger as it left my body, but Renata didn’t flinch.

“Ask Grant,” she said.

I stood up to leave.

“Wait a minute,” she said. She unlocked the door to Bloom and opened the cash register. Lifting the cash drawer, she extracted a sealed red envelope, my name printed neatly across the front, and a stack of twenty-dollar bills. Walking back outside, she held out the cash.

“Your final paycheck,” she said. I didn’t count the money she handed me, but I could tell it was much more than I had earned. When I had put it in my backpack, she handed me the envelope and her unopened burrito. “Protein,” she said. “That’s what my mother always says. It builds the baby’s brain. Or maybe it’s the bones—I can’t remember.”

I thanked her, turning to walk down the hill.

“If you ever need anything,” she called after me, “you know where to find me.”

The rest of the day I spent in the blue room, fighting off waves of nausea as the baby fluttered inside me. The red envelope lay on the white fur floor like a bloodstain, and I sat cross-legged beside it. I couldn’t decide whether to open it or to slip it under the rug and forget about it.

Finally, I decided I had to know. It would be hard to read Grant’s words but even harder to go through the pregnancy without knowing if he had guessed the reason for my abrupt parting.

But when I opened the envelope, it was not what I had expected. It was a wedding invitation: Bethany and Ray, the first weekend in November, Ocean Beach. The wedding was less than two weeks away. I was invited, Bethany wrote on the back, as a guest, but would I also do the flowers? What she wanted most, she wrote, was permanence, and after that, passion. The opposite of the cherry blossom, I thought, cringing at the memory of the afternoon in Catherine’s studio and everything that moment had become. I would suggest honeysuckle, I decided, devotion. The very strength of the vine suggested a permanence I had never experienced but hoped Bethany would.

Bethany had included her phone number and asked me to call by the end of August. The date had long passed, and she had likely found another florist, but I had to try. It was the only foreseeable source of income in what would be a long, idle winter.

Picking up on the second ring, Bethany gasped at the sound of my voice.

“Victoria!” she said. “I’d given up! I found another florist, but that woman is about to lose a job, deposit or no.”

She and Ray could meet the following day, she said. I gave her directions to my house.

“I hope you’ll stay for the wedding,” she said before she hung up. “You know, I credit your bouquet as the beginning of everything.”

“I will,” I said. And I would bring something resembling business cards.

I asked Natalya if I could meet with Bethany and Ray downstairs, and she agreed. Early the following morning, I bought a card table and three folding chairs at a flea market in South San Francisco. They fit inside the back of my car, the hatchback tied down with a rope. In addition to the furniture, I bought a rose-colored cut crystal vase with a discreet chip for a dollar and a white lace tablecloth with a pink plastic liner for three. I wrapped the vase in the tablecloth and took the side streets home.

Before Bethany and Ray arrived, I set up the card table in the empty office space. Covering it with the lace cloth, I set the crystal vase in the center, full of flowers from my garden in McKinley Square. Next to the vase sat my blue photo box. I checked and rechecked my alphabetization while I waited for the door to open.

Finally, it did, and Bethany stood in the empty doorway more beautiful than I remembered, Ray more handsome than I imagined. They would make a breathtaking couple, I thought, draping honeysuckle in long lines through the white sand.

Bethany opened her arms to hug me, and I allowed it, my belly a ball between us. Looking down, she gasped and placed her hands on my stomach. I wondered how many times I would have to endure this in the coming months, from acquaintances and strangers on the street. Pregnancy seemed to remove the unspoken societal laws of personal space. I disliked it almost as much as the feeling of another human being growing within my body.

“Congratulations!” Bethany said, hugging me again. “When are you due?”

It was the second time I’d been asked in two days, and I knew the frequency would increase along with my size. I counted the months in my head.

“February,” I said. “Or March. The doctors aren’t sure.”

Bethany introduced me to Ray, and we shook hands. Motioning to the table and chairs, I asked them to sit down. I sat across from them, apologizing for taking so long to call.

“We’re just so glad you did,” Bethany said, squeezing Ray’s thick arm. “I’ve told Ray all about you.”

I pushed the blue box toward the couple. It glowed under the fluorescent office lights. “I can do anything you want for your wedding. Nearly everything is available at the flower market, even out of season.” Bethany opened the lid, and I cringed as if she was again touching my body.

Ray picked up the first card. In the years that followed, I watched many men squirm in front of my flower dictionary, the fluorescent lights casting a sickly shadow on their nervous faces. But Ray wasn’t one of them. His bulk was deceiving; he discussed emotions like Annemarie’s lady friends, with loquacious enthusiasm and indecision. They got stuck on the first card, acacia, as Grant and I had, but for completely different reasons.

“Secret love,” he said. “I like that.”

“ ‘Secret’?” Bethany asked. “Why secret?” She said it with mock offense, as if he was suggesting they hide their love from the world.

“Because what we have is secret. My friends, when they talk about their girlfriends or wives, complaining or bragging, I just keep quiet. What we have—it’s different. I want to keep it that way. Untouched. Secret.”

“Mmm,” Bethany said. “Yes.” She turned over the card and viewed the photo of the acacia blossom, a feathery golden sphere-shaped flower hanging on a delicate stem. There was more than one acacia tree in McKinley Square. I hoped they were in bloom. “What can you do with this?” she asked.

“It depends on what else you want. Acacia isn’t a centerpiece flower. I would probably drape it around the edge of a nosegay, half concealing your hands.”

“I like that,” said Bethany. She turned back to Ray. “What else?”

In the end, they decided on fuchsia moss roses with pale pink lilac, cream-colored dahlia, honeysuckle, and the golden acacia. They would have to return the bridesmaid’s dresses; the burgundy silk would clash. Bethany was relieved they were from a department store and that she hadn’t special-ordered. The flowers were the most important, she said with confidence, and Ray agreed.

As they stood up to go, I told them I would deliver the flowers at noon and return for the two-o’clock wedding. “I can adjust your bouquet at the last minute,” I told her, “if it needs anything.”

Bethany hugged me again. “That would be wonderful,” she said. “My greatest fear is that the roses will suddenly snap when the wedding music starts to play, and both my wedding and my good fortune will be shattered.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “Flowers don’t spontaneously combust.” I looked from Bethany to Ray as I said it. She smiled. I was talking about Ray, not the flowers, and she understood.

“I know,” she said.

“Do you mind if I bring business cards?” I asked. “I’m just starting out here.” I nodded to the white walls.

“Of course!” she said. “Bring cards! And bring a guest; we forgot to tell you that.” Bethany nodded to my stomach and winked. The baby kicked; my nausea returned.

“I will,” I said, “bring cards—not a guest. Thank you.”

Bethany looked embarrassed, and Ray, flushing, pulled her to the door. “Thank you,” she said. “Really. I can’t thank you enough.”

Standing at the glass door, I watched them walk up the hill to their car. Ray wrapped his arm around Bethany’s waist. I knew he was comforting her, assuring her that the strange, solitary young woman with the magical way with flowers was happy to be having a fatherless child.

I was not.

4.

I bought a black dress in Union Square and four dozen purple irises from a bucket on Market Street. The black dress concealed my bulge and would lessen the brazen hands; the irises would become my business cards. I cut lavender paper into rectangles and punched a hole in each. On one side I wrote Message in a scripty, Elizabeth-inspired hand. On the other I wrote Victoria Jones, Florist, in my own plain print. I included Natalya’s phone number.

There was only one stumbling block, and it turned out to be more complicated than I had thought. I still had Renata’s wholesale card, but I couldn’t buy my flowers at the flower market. Grant was there every day except Sunday. It wouldn’t be possible to buy flowers on Sunday for a wedding the following Saturday. I had planned to drive to San Jose or Santa Rosa for the nearest wholesale market, but when I began to look, I learned there weren’t any others in all of Northern California. Florists drove for hundreds of miles in the middle of the night to buy flowers in San Francisco.

I considered buying the flowers at a retail shop, but after calculating the cost, I realized I wouldn’t make a profit this way; it might even end up costing me money. So, on the Friday before the wedding, I drove to The Gathering House, walked up the cement stairs, and knocked on the heavy door.

A thin girl with white-blond hair let me in.

“Anyone here need a job?” I asked. The blond girl walked down the hall and didn’t come back. A cluster of girls on the couch looked at me with suspicion.

“I used to live here,” I said. “I’m a florist now. I have a wedding tomorrow, and need help buying flowers.” A few of the girls stood up and crossed the room to join me at the dining room table.

By way of an interview, I asked the girls three questions, listening to their responses one at a time. The first question—Do you have an alarm clock?—elicited a solemn series of nods. The second—Do you know how to get to 6th and Brannan by bus?—eliminated a short, overweight red-head at the end of the table. She did not, under any circumstance, she told me, ride the bus. I flicked her away with my thumb and forefinger.

I asked the remaining two girls why they needed the money. The first to respond, a Latina girl named Lilia, rattled off a long list of desires, some essential, but many self-indulgent. Her highlights were growing out, she said, she was almost out of lotion, and she didn’t have any shoes that matched the outfit her boyfriend had given her. She mentioned rent as an afterthought. I liked her name but not her answers.

I couldn’t see the last girl’s eyes under her long bangs. When she occasionally wiped them off her face, she would leave her hand in their place over her forehead. But her answer to my question was simple and exactly what I was waiting for. If she didn’t make rent, she said, she would be evicted. Her voice choked as she said it, and she slid her face down into her turtleneck sweater until only her nose peeked above the knit. I was looking for someone desperate enough to hear an alarm clock at three-thirty a.m. and actually get out of bed; this girl would not disappoint me. I told her to meet me at the bus stop on Brannan, a block from the flower market, at five a.m. the following day.

The girl was late. Not late enough to hinder my ability to complete the arrangements on time but enough to make me worry. I didn’t have a backup plan, and I would rather leave Bethany at the altar without a bouquet than risk seeing Grant. Every time I thought of him, my body ached and the baby squirmed. But the girl arrived, sprinting and out of breath, fifteen minutes after we had agreed. She had fallen asleep on the bus and missed her stop, she said, but would work fast and make up the time. I handed her my wholesale card, a stack of cash, and a list of flowers.

While the girl was inside, I patrolled the outside of the building, fearful that she would try to make a run for it with the money. The many emergency exits worried me; I hoped they were alarmed. But half an hour later, the girl emerged, her arms full of flowers. She handed them to me with the change, and then went back inside for the second half. When she returned, we loaded the flowers into my car, driving back to Potrero Hill in silence.

I had covered the downstairs floor with thick painter’s plastic. Natalya said I could do whatever I wanted with the downstairs during the day, as long as it didn’t interfere with her band’s ability to practice at night. The vases I had purchased on sale at a dollar store were lined up in the center of the room, already filled with water, and a roll of ribbon and pins sat beside them.

We set to work on the ground. As the girl watched, I demonstrated how to de-thorn roses, trim leaves, and cut stems at an angle. She prepared the flowers while I began the arrangements. We worked until my legs began to cramp, the weight of my body heavy on the floor. I went upstairs to stretch, and retrieved the acacia and honeysuckle I had gathered. It sat on the middle shelf of the refrigerator, next to a package of cinnamon rolls and a gallon of milk. I gathered everything and carried it downstairs, holding the pastry box out to the girl.

“Thanks,” she said, taking two. “My name’s Marlena, in case you forgot.”

I had forgotten. There was little memorable about Marlena. Everything about her was plain, and even her plainness was hidden by long hair and baggy clothes. She shook her head and blew forcefully over her upper lip so that her bangs parted and settled on either side of her brown eyes. Her face, which I could finally see, was round, with smooth, unblemished skin. She wore an enormous fleece sweatshirt that hung almost to her knees and made her look like a lost child. When she finished eating, her bangs fell onto her face again; she didn’t move them.

“I’m Victoria,” I said. I handed her a tall iris from a vase by the table. She read the card.

“You’re lucky,” she said. “A businesswoman with a baby on the way. I don’t think many of us are going to make it like you have.”

I didn’t tell her about my months in McKinley Square, or the dread I felt every time I remembered that the churning mass growing inside me would become a child: a screaming, hungry, living thing.

“Some will, some won’t,” I said. “Same as everywhere.” I finished my cinnamon roll and started back to work. Hours passed, and occasionally Marlena would ask a question or compliment my arrangements, but I worked beside her in silence. My mind was full of memories of Renata, my first morning with her at the flower market, learning to buy flowers, and later that same day, sitting at her long table, the nod of her approval punctuating each bouquet I assembled.

When we were done, Marlena helped me put the flowers in my car, and I got out my cash. “How much do you need?” I asked.

Marlena was prepared for the question. “Sixty dollars,” she said. “To pay rent on the first. Then I can stay another month.”

I counted out three twenties, paused, and gave her a fourth. “Here’s eighty,” I said. “Call me at the number on the card every Monday. I’ll tell you when I have more work.”

“Thank you,” she said. I could have taken her home—the wedding was only a few blocks from The Gathering House—but I had tired of company. I waited for her to walk around the corner before climbing into the car and driving to the beach.

The wedding was perfect. The roses did not snap; the honeysuckle draped but did not tangle. Afterward, I stood at the entrance to the parking lot and handed an iris to every guest. No one touched my stomach. I did not attend the reception.

I hadn’t told Natalya about my business, so I rarely left the house and always answered the phone. “Message,” I would say into the receiver, my intonation a mixture of question and statement. Natalya’s friends would leave her a message, and I would tape notes to her bedroom door. Customers would introduce themselves and explain their events, and I would pinpoint their desires through a chain of questions or invite them downstairs for a consultation. Bethany’s friends were wealthy, and no one, even once, asked the price of a flower. I charged more when I needed the money, less as my business began to grow.

As I waited for the phone to ring and my appointment book to fill, I made two additional sets of boxes. I didn’t like the idea of strangers sitting at the table, fingering my blue box, and I needed a box organized by flower, as Grant’s had been. From the negatives I’d kept, I printed new photographs, mounted them on plain white cardstock, and filed them in shoeboxes I scavenged. One set I placed on the downstairs table, the second set I gave to Marlena, telling her to memorize every card. My blue box I returned to my room, safe behind the row of deadbolts.

I was called for a baby shower in Los Altos Hills, a toddler’s birthday party in a wood-floored flat on California Avenue, and a wedding shower in the Marina, across the street from my favorite deli. I had three holiday parties and a New Year’s party at Bethany and Ray’s. Everywhere I went, I brought a silver bucket of irises, all tagged. By January, Marlena had made enough to pay first and last months’ rent for her own apartment, and I had sixteen summer weddings scheduled.

I didn’t take requests for anything for the entire month of March, and my February engagements made me nervous. Four plastic one-gallon containers of dittany sat in the corners of the blue room. Without light, the plant would never bloom. I kept the light off and tried to delay the inevitable.

But the baby within me, despite my dread, continued to grow. My stomach was so big by late January that I had to tilt the seat of my small car as far back as it would go. Even then, there was only an inch between my belly and the steering wheel. When the baby jabbed an elbow or a foot forward, it felt as though it was reaching out to take control of the car. I wore men’s clothes, T-shirts and sweatshirts that were too big and too long, and elastic-waist pants pulled low over my stomach. Occasionally, I passed as overweight, but most of the time I still fell prey to curious hands.

I met with clients as little as possible in the final month of my pregnancy, and delivered flowers well before guests arrived, leaving the bucket of iris behind. My ever-sloppier appearance was out of place among the well-dressed women, and I could see, though they pretended otherwise, that it made them uncomfortable.

Mother Ruby began to appear with frequency, only halfheartedly making excuses for her visits. Natalya was looking thin, she told me the first time, and she had baked a tofu casserole. Neither Natalya, who was not looking thin, nor I ate it. Tofu was one of the few foods I couldn’t stomach. When Natalya left to go on her first monthlong tour—the spread of her fan base had widened—I threw the casserole away in its heavy glass dish. Alone in the apartment, I began looking out the window before leaving, and if Mother Ruby sat on the sidewalk below, I would return to the blue room and lock all six locks.

Renata had told her mother of my pregnancy, I knew. Natalya wouldn’t have invited the frequent visits, and Renata, despite firing me, cared about my well-being, and had, inexplicably, from the moment we met. In the early mornings, as I arranged flowers on the downstairs floor, I would see her drive by, her truck heavy on the way to her shop. Our eyes would catch, and she would wave, and sometimes I would wave back, but she never stopped, and I never stood up.

In preparation for the baby, I gathered minimal newborn supplies: blankets, a bottle, formula, pajamas, and a hat. I couldn’t think of anything else. Wrapped in a numb paralysis, I purchased it all without anticipation or anxiety. I was not afraid of childbirth. Women had given birth since the beginning of time. Mothers died, babies died; mothers lived, and babies lived. Mothers raised babies and abandoned them, boys and girls, healthy and defected. I thought of all the possible outcomes, and not one seemed more tolerable than any of the others.

On the twenty-fifth of February I awoke swimming in water, and the pain started immediately after.

Natalya was still touring, and I was grateful for that. I had imagined biting pillows to muffle the sounds of childbirth, but there was no need. It was a Saturday, the adjacent office buildings were closed, and our apartment was empty. I opened my mouth at the first wavelike contraction, and a low growl came from somewhere within me. I did not recognize my voice or the burning pain in my body. When it passed, I closed my eyes and imagined myself floating on a deep blue sea.

I floated for a minute, maybe two, before the pain returned, sharper than before. Rolling onto my side, I felt the walls of my stomach like steel, closing in around the baby, pushing it down. The fur floor came out in wet clumps under the grasp of my fingers, and when the pain passed, I drummed angry fists against the bare patches.

The smell of dittany and damp soil seemed to be beckoning the baby, and all I wanted was to leave. It would be different on the cold cement sidewalk, I thought, amid traffic and noise. The baby would understand that there was no space in the world for a gentle entrance, nothing soft or welcoming. I would walk to the Mission and buy a donut, and the baby would get high on chocolate glaze and decide to remain unborn. Sitting in a hard plastic booth, the pain would stop; it had to.

Crawling out of the blue room, I tried to stand up. But I couldn’t. The contractions were a sweeping undertow, pulling me down. On all fours, I crept to the stool pushed against the kitchen counter, my neck dangling on the low metal bar. Perhaps my neck would snap, I thought with some optimism. Perhaps my head would roll off, severed, and this would be over. I opened my mouth and bit down on the metal as the next contraction overwhelmed me.

When the pain released, I craved water. Sliding across the wall to the bathroom, I bent over the sink, turned on the faucet, and cupped handfuls into my open mouth. It wasn’t enough. I turned on the water in the shower and pulled myself into the bathtub, the steady stream running into my mouth and down my throat. Turning around, I let the water soak through my clothes and down the length of my body. I stayed that way, the top of my head against the wall and the pressure drumming my lower back, until I ran out of hot water and stood, shivering, in dripping clothes.

Outside the shower, I leaned over the sink and began to swear, my voice deep and angry. I would hate my child for this. Mothers must all secretly despise their children for the inexcusable pain of childbirth. I understood my own mother in that moment as clearly as if we had just been introduced. I imagined her sneaking out of the hospital alone, her body split in two, abandoning her perfect swaddled baby, the baby she had exchanged for her own once-perfect body, her own once-pain-free existence. The pain and sacrifice were not forgivable. I did not deserve to be forgiven. Looking in the mirror, I tried to imagine my mother’s face.

The searing of the next contraction caused me to double over, my forehead pressed against the curved metal faucet. When I lifted my head and looked back into the mirror, it was not my imagined mother’s face I saw but Elizabeth’s. Her eyes were glazed, the way they got during the harvest, wild and full of anticipation.

I wanted, more than anything, to be with her.

5.

“Elizabeth!” I called.

My voice was frenzied, desperate. An early moon rose above Perla’s trailer, and the low rectangular structure cast a dark shadow up the hill to where I stood. Elizabeth responded to my voice immediately, turning to race along the edge of the shadow. She slipped in and out of the darkness until she stood before me. Moonlight illuminated the few silver hairs curling around her temples. Her face, in shadows, was a compilation of angles and lines accented by two soft, round eyes.

“Here,” I said. My heart beat audibly. I held out a single wine grape, polished it against my damp T-shirt, and held it out to her again.

Elizabeth took the grape and looked at me. Her mouth opened and closed. She chewed once, expelled seeds, chewed, swallowed, and chewed again. Her face changed. The strain lifted, and the sugar from the grape seemed to sweeten her skin; she flushed a youthful pink, smiled, and, without a moment’s hesitation, enclosed me in her strong arms. My great accomplishment expanded into the air around us until we were enveloped, protected in a bubble of our mutual joy. I leaned into her, proud, glowing, wrapping my arms around her waist, my feet still and my heart racing.

Holding me at arm’s length, she looked into my eyes. “Yes,” she said. “Finally.”

We had been searching for the first ripe grape for nearly a week. A sudden rise in temperatures had caused a spike in sweetness so sudden it was impossible to accurately evaluate the thousands of plants. Elizabeth, frantic, began to order me around as if I was an extension of her own tongue. Acres went untouched while Elizabeth and I split up and went row by row, sucking out centers, chewing skin, and spitting seeds. Elizabeth gave me a pointed stick, and in front of every vine I tasted I was to draw an O or an X, her symbols for sun and shade, followed by my sugar-tannin count. I started by the road: O 71:5, moved to behind the trailers: X 68:3, and then climbed the hill above the wine cellar: O 72:6. Elizabeth paced acres far from where I tasted but eventually came back to retrace my steps, tasting every second or third row and comparing it to my notes.

She hadn’t needed to question my ability, and she knew that now. She kissed my forehead, and I rocked toward her on my toes. For the first time in months, I felt wanted, cherished. Elizabeth sat down on the hillside and pulled me to her. We sat together in silence, watching the moon rise.

Our required focus on the approaching harvest had dulled Grant’s warning. There had been no time to think about Catherine or her threat. Now, surrounded by ripe grapes, our veins pounding with love for each other and for the vineyard, his words returned. I felt a rush of nerves.

“Are you worried?” I asked.

Elizabeth was quiet, her expression thoughtful. Before she spoke, she turned and brushed my bangs away from my eyes, stroking the side of my face. She nodded. “About Catherine, yes,” she said. “Not the vineyard.”

“Why?”

“My sister isn’t well,” she said. “Grant didn’t say much, but he didn’t have to. He was terrified. You’d understand if you’d seen his face, and also if you knew my mother.”

“What do you mean?” I didn’t understand how Elizabeth’s dead mother had anything to do with Catherine’s present condition, or the fear in Grant’s face.

“My mother was mentally ill,” Elizabeth said. “I didn’t even see her for the last few years of her life. I was too afraid. She didn’t remember me, or she’d remember some awful thing I’d done and blame me for her illness. It was horrific, but I shouldn’t have just left her alone, left Catherine with the burden.”

“What could you have done?” I asked.

“I could have cared for her. It’s too late now, obviously. She passed away almost a decade ago. But I can still care for my sister—even if she doesn’t want me to. I’ve already talked to Grant about it, and he agrees that it’s a good idea.”

“What?” I was shocked. Elizabeth and I had tasted grapes twelve hours a day for a week. I couldn’t imagine when she’d had time to talk to Grant.

“He needs us, Victoria, and Catherine does, too. Their house is almost as big as ours—there’ll be plenty of room for all of us.” I shook my head back and forth slowly, and then picked up speed as what she was suggesting sank in. My hair flapped around my ears and hit my nose. She wanted us to move in with Catherine. She wanted me to live with, help care for, the woman who had ruined my life.

“No,” I said, jumping up and away from Elizabeth. “You can go, but I won’t.”

When I looked at her, she turned away, and my words hung in the air between us.

6.

I wanted Elizabeth.

I wanted her to hold me as she had among the vines, clean my sweat-drenched face and shoulders with the same thorough, gentle touch she had used to clean my thorn-punctured palms. I wanted her to wrap me in gauze and carry me to breakfast and tell me not to climb trees.

But she was unreachable.

And even if I did somehow reach her, she wouldn’t come.

Without warning, I threw up into the sink and gasped for air. There wasn’t any time to breathe. The contractions hit me like a wall of water, and I was sure that I would drown. Picking up the phone, I dialed the number for Bloom. Renata answered. Through my desperate gasping, I heard her voice register understanding. She slammed down the phone.

Minutes later she was in the living room. I had crawled back into the blue room on all fours, my feet sticking out the half-door. “I’m glad you called,” Renata said. I drew my feet into the room until I was curled into a ball on my side. When Renata tried to peek in, I closed the door in her face.

“Call your mother,” I said. “She has to come get this baby out of me.”

“I already did,” Renata said, “and she was nearby. Probably on purpose. She has premonitions about these things. She’ll be here any minute.”

I screamed and rolled over onto my hands and knees.

Without hearing her enter, Mother Ruby was there, undressing me. Her hands were all over my body, inside and out, but I didn’t care. She would get the baby out. Whatever she had to do, I was ready. If she’d produced a knife to slice me open on the spot, I wouldn’t have looked away.

Reaching for me, she held a paper cup and straw to my lips. I sipped something cold and sweet. Afterward, she wiped the corners of my mouth with a cloth.

“Please,” I said, “please. Whatever you have to do. Just get it out.”

“You’re doing it,” she said. “You’re the only one that can get this baby out.”

The blue room was on fire. Water is not supposed to be flammable, but there I was, drowning and burning simultaneously. I could not breathe; I could not see. There was no air; there was no exit.

“Please,” I said, my voice breaking.

Mother Ruby crouched down, her eyes level with mine, our foreheads touching. She placed my arms around her shoulders, and I moved from knees to feet as if she might pull me out of the blazing water, but she didn’t move. We were low to the ground, and she was listening.

“The baby’s coming,” she said. “You’re bringing her here. Only you can do it.”

It was right then that I understood what she was telling me. I started to cry, my moaning wails remorseful. This time, there was no escape. I could not turn away, could not leave without accepting what I had done. There was only one way to the other side, and that was through the pain.

Finally, my body surrendered. I stopped fighting, and the baby began to move—slowly, excruciatingly—down the birth canal and into Mother Ruby’s waiting arms.

7.

It was a girl. She was born at noon, just six hours after my water broke. It felt like six days, and if Mother Ruby had told me it had been six years, I would have believed her. I emerged from the birth with a sense of peaceful exultation, and the smile that greeted me in the bathroom mirror hours later did not belong to the angry, hateful child who transported buckets of thistle from roadside ditches. I was a woman, a mother.

Mother Ruby said it was a perfect birth and a perfect baby, and she told me I would be a perfect mother. She bathed her while Renata went to the store for diapers, and then placed the warm bundle in my arms for the first time. I expected her to be asleep, but she wasn’t. Her eyes were open, taking in my tired face, short hair, and pale skin. Her face twitched into what looked like a squinty smile, and in her wordless expression I saw gratitude, and relief, and trust. I wanted, desperately, not to disappoint her.

Mother Ruby lifted my shirt, cupped my breast, and pressed the baby’s face against my uplifted skin. The baby opened her mouth and began to suck.

“Perfect,” Mother Ruby said again.

She was perfect. I knew this the moment she emerged from my body, white and wet and wailing. Beyond the requisite ten fingers and ten toes, the beating heart, the lungs inhaling and exhaling oxygen, my daughter knew how to scream. She knew how to make herself heard. She knew how to reach out and latch on. She knew what she needed to do to survive. I didn’t know how it was possible that such perfection could have developed within a body as flawed as my own, but when I looked into her face, I saw that it clearly was.

“Does she have a name?” Renata asked when she returned.

“I don’t know,” I said, stroking the baby’s fuzzy ear as she continued to suck. I hadn’t ever thought about it. “I don’t know her yet.”

But I would. I would keep her, and raise her, and love her, even if she had to teach me how to do it. Holding my own daughter in my arms, only hours old, I felt that everything in the world that had been so far out of my reach was now possible.

The feeling stayed with me for exactly a week.

Mother Ruby stayed until almost midnight and returned early the next morning. In the eight hours I spent alone with the baby, I listened to her breathing, counted her heartbeats, and watched her fingers stretch open and close into fists. I smelled her skin, her saliva, and the oily white cream that had resisted Mother Ruby’s washcloth and nestled in the creases of her arms and legs. Rubbing every inch of her body, my own fingers became slick with the thick residue.

Mother Ruby had told me the baby would sleep for six or more hours the first night, exhausted from the birth. It’s the first gift that a child gives its mother, she had told me before she left. Not the last. Take it, and sleep. I tried to sleep, but my mind was full of wonder at the existence of a child, a child who had not existed in the world only the day before, a child whose life had come from within my own body. Watching my baby sleep, I understood that she was safe, and that she knew it. I felt a rush of adrenaline at this simple accomplishment. The next morning, when I heard Mother Ruby fit a key into the downstairs lock, I hadn’t slept for even a moment.

Mother Ruby pulled her great birthing bag up the steps and unzipped it at the door of the blue room. The baby was awake and nursing. When she pulled away from my breast, Mother Ruby listened to her heart and slipped her into a cloth sling with a metal spring that was somehow also a scale. She exclaimed at the ounces the baby had gained—unusual, she said, in the first twenty-four hours. The baby whimpered and began to suck air. Mother Ruby pressed her against my other breast, checking the baby’s latch with her index finger.

“Keep eating, big girl,” she said.

We both watched the baby nurse, her eyes closed, temples beating. It was the last thing in the world I had ever expected to do, breast-feed a baby. But Mother Ruby insisted it was what was best for us both; that the baby would thrive and we would bond and my body would regain its shape. Mother Ruby was proud, and told me so two or three times an hour. Not all mothers have the patience, she said, or the selflessness, but she knew I would. I had not disappointed her.

I was proud, too. Proud that my body was producing everything my baby needed, and proud that I could tolerate the relentless clamping of the baby’s jaw, the sensation of liquid transferring from deep within my body to deep within my daughter’s. The baby nursed for more than an hour, but I didn’t mind. The feeding gave me time to study her face, memorize her short, straight eyelashes; her naked brow; the pinprick white dots scattering her nose and cheeks. When her eyes flitted open, I studied the dark gray, looking for signs of the brown or blue they would become. I wondered if she would resemble me or Grant, or if she would look like a maternal or paternal relative, none of whom I had met. I did not yet recognize anything about her.

Mother Ruby scrambled eggs while reading aloud from a book on newborn care. She fed me small bites while quizzing me on the text. I listened to every word and repeated every answer verbatim. Mother Ruby stopped reading when the baby fell asleep and refused to continue, even when I pleaded with her to keep going.

“Sleep, Victoria,” Mother Ruby said, closing the book. “It’s the most important thing. Postpartum hormones can warp reality if they aren’t tempered with generous stretches of sleep.” She reached her arms out for me to hand her the baby. Although sleep was already pulling me under, I was reluctant to hand her my daughter. Separation, I feared, could be irreversible. The pleasure I found in the baby’s touch was new and unreliable; I was afraid if I gave her up I wouldn’t be able to bear her touch when she was returned.

But Mother Ruby did not understand my hesitation. She reached in and withdrew the baby, and before I could protest, I was asleep.

Mother Ruby was not the only one to visit that first week. The day after the birth, Renata shopped for a featherbed for the blue room and a Moses basket for the baby, carrying them upstairs in two trips. She came back every afternoon with lunch for both of us. I lay on my new featherbed with the half-door open, the baby asleep with her cheek pressed against my bare breast, as I ate noodles or sandwiches with my hands. Renata perched on a bar stool. We rarely talked; neither she nor I could communicate in the presence of my nakedness, but our silence grew more comfortable as the days passed. The baby ate and slept and ate again. As long as she stretched across my body, skin to skin, she was content.

On Tuesday, while Renata and I ate in our accustomed silence, Marlena came to the door. I’d stopped answering the phone, and we had an anniversary dinner the following day. Renata let her in, and she delighted over the baby. She held and rocked and shushed her with a naturalness that caused Renata to raise her eyebrows and shake her head. I asked Renata to retrieve cash from my backpack and give it to Marlena; she would have to do the flowers for the dinner herself.

“No,” Renata said. “You keep her here. I’ll do the flowers.” She got out the cash and also my event calendar, where I had written the purchasing list and the address of the restaurant. Renata scanned the book. I had nothing else for thirty days.

“I’ll be back with lunch tomorrow,” she said. “And I’ll show you the centerpieces. You can approve them.”

She turned to Marlena and shook her hand awkwardly under the sleeping ball of baby. “I’m Renata,” she said. “Stay here as long as you can today, and come back tomorrow as well. I’ll pay you whatever hourly rate you usually make.”

“Just to hold the baby?” Marlena asked.

Renata nodded.

“I will,” Marlena promised. “Thank you.” She spun in slow motion, and the baby sighed, sound asleep.

“Thank you,” I said to Renata. “I could use a nap.” I hadn’t slept deeply in days, always aware, even in sleep, of the baby’s location and needs. It seemed I had inherited a maternal gene after all, I thought, remembering Renata’s words on the drive to our first dinner together.

Renata walked over to where I lay on the featherbed, my hand reaching out the half-door and stretching into the living room. She stood over me as if trying to figure out how to hug me but gave up and nudged my hand gently with her big toe. I squeezed her foot, and she smiled. “See you tomorrow,” she said.

“Okay.”

Renata’s boots padded down the stairs. The metal frame of the door rattled as she walked out.

“What’s her name?” Marlena asked, kissing the baby’s sleeping forehead. She settled onto one of the bar stools, but the baby stirred. Standing up again, she walked the length of the room and back with a slow sway.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m thinking about it.”

I hadn’t actually thought about it, but I knew I needed to start. Even though I wasn’t doing anything but feeding and diapering and swaddling, there didn’t seem to be space, mental or otherwise, for anything else. Marlena moved into the kitchen, the baby nuzzling the length of her chest and pressing her pink cheek against Marlena’s shoulder. She began to cook with one hand. Easily. I couldn’t cook, and I definitely couldn’t cook one-handed with a baby on my shoulder.

“Where’d you learn?” I asked.

“To cook?”

I nodded. “And babies.”

“My last foster home had a daycare. The woman kept me because I home-schooled and helped with the infants. I didn’t mind. It was better than high school.”

“You home-schooled?” I asked. My mind flashed back to the task list on Elizabeth’s refrigerator door; I checked my watch reflexively.

“Yeah,” she said, “the last few years. I was so far behind, the county thought it might help me get caught up, but I just got further behind. When I turned eighteen, I gave up on school and moved in to The Gathering House.”

“I was home-schooled, too,” I said. One o’clock. Elizabeth would have been just drying and putting away the last dish, drilling me on my eights, maybe my nines.

Something simmered on the stove, and Marlena added salt. I was surprised she had found anything to cook in the empty cabinets. The baby startled awake, and Marlena transferred her to the other shoulder. She angled the baby so she could see what she was cooking and mumbled something soft, a prayer or a poem, that I couldn’t make out. The baby closed her eyes.

“You’re better with kids than flowers,” I said.

“I’m learning,” Marlena said, not appearing offended.

“Yeah,” I said, watching her work. “Me, too.”

As Marlena chopped, the baby’s head jiggled gently. “You should sleep,” she said. “While the baby is happy. You know she’ll be hungry again soon.”

I nodded. “Okay,” I said. “Wake me up if she needs anything.”

“I will.” Marlena turned back to the stove.

I closed the half-door, waiting for sleep. Marlena’s soft lullaby floated through the crack, the tune familiar. As I drifted around the edge of consciousness, I wondered if someone had sung to me when I was a baby, someone who didn’t love me, someone who would give me back.

On Saturday morning, a week after the birth, Mother Ruby arrived and began her daily routine. She asked me a hundred questions about my bleeding, after-pains, and appetite. She checked for evidence I had eaten dinner the night before, and listened to the baby’s heart before wrapping her in the cloth scale.

“Eight ounces,” Mother Ruby announced. “You’re doing great.” She unwrapped the baby and changed her diaper. In the process, the baby’s umbilical cord, which I never touched and tried not to look at, snapped off.

“Congratulations, angel,” Mother Ruby whispered into my daughter’s sleeping face. The baby arched her back and reached out, her eyes still closed.

She cleaned the baby’s belly button with something in an unlabeled bottle. Re-swaddling her, she handed her back to me. “No infections, eating, sleeping, and gaining weight,” she said. “And you’re getting help?”

“Renata brought food,” I said. “And Marlena was here for a few days.”

“Good.” Roaming the room, she packed up her books, blankets, towels, bottles, and tubes.

“Leaving?” I asked with surprise. I was used to her spending most of the morning with me.

“You don’t need me anymore, Victoria,” she said, sitting next to me on the couch and putting her arm around my shoulders. She pulled me to her until my face was pressed against her breast. “Look at you. You’re a mother. Believe me when I tell you there are many women out there who need me more than you do.”

I nodded into her chest and did not protest.

She stood up and took a final loop around the small apartment. Her eyes settled on the cans of formula I had purchased before the baby was born. “I’ll donate these,” she said, stuffing them into her already-full bag. “You won’t need them. I’ll be back next Saturday, and then two Saturdays after that, just to check the baby’s weight gain. Call me if you need anything.”

I nodded again and watched her walk lightly down the stairs. She had not left her phone number.

You’re a mother, I repeated to myself. I was hoping the words would reassure me, but instead I felt something familiar trembling inside of me. It started deep in my stomach and picked up momentum as it tumbled into the cavernous space that had once held the baby.

Panic.

I tried to breathe, willing it away.

8.

I regretted my ultimatum.

Choose me or choose your sister, my words had demanded. Elizabeth, by not running after me, had made her choice clear.

All night and well into the morning, I plotted. My desire was simple: to stay with Elizabeth, and Elizabeth alone. But I could think of no way to convince her. I could not whine or beg. Do you even know me? she would ask, her eyes amused, as I begged to eat her muffin batter. I could not hide; Elizabeth would find me, as she always did. I could not tie myself to the bedposts and refuse to move; she would cut the ropes and carry me.

There was only one possibility, and that was to turn Elizabeth against her sister. She had to see Catherine for what she was: a selfish, hateful woman unworthy of her care.

And then, all at once, I saw the solution. My heartbeat grew deafening as I lay still, turning the idea around in my head, looking for problems. There were none. As surely as Catherine had ambushed my adoption, she had provided me with the ammunition I needed to stay with Elizabeth, and Elizabeth alone. I would win the battle she had unconsciously waged, even before she knew she had waged it.

Slowly, I stood up. I slipped off my nightgown and pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. In the bathroom, I scrubbed my face with cold water and hand soap harder than usual, my fingernails scratching lines in the white soap residue. Looking at myself in the mirror, I searched for signs of fear, or anxiety, or apprehension of what was to come. But my eyes were flat, my chin set with determination. There was only one way to get what I wanted. It could not be ignored.

In the kitchen, Elizabeth washed dishes. A bowl of cold oatmeal sat on the table.

“The crews are already here,” Elizabeth said, motioning with her head in the direction of the hill on which we’d stood the night before. “Eat your breakfast and put on your shoes before I leave you behind.” She turned back to the sink.

“I’m not coming,” I said, and in the drop of Elizabeth’s shoulder blades, I could see disappointment but not surprise.

I opened the pantry and plucked an empty canvas bag off a hook.

It was warm on the front porch, even though it was still early. I walked slowly down the long driveway, toward the road. Again, Elizabeth did not come after me. I wished it was cooler, wished I’d packed a bagful of food. I would be hot and hungry as I sat in the ditch in front of the flower farm. But I would wait. As long as it took for Grant to leave, even if I had to spend the night by the side of the road, I would wait. Eventually, his truck would rumble through the open gate, leaving the farmhouse exposed.

When it did, I’d sneak inside for what I needed.

9.

Renata did not come on Sunday. Neither did Marlena. I stayed in the blue room for what I thought was most of the day, nursing the baby and sleeping, but when I emerged with a full bladder and an empty stomach, it was only ten o’clock in the morning.

Leaning against the bar stool, I debated between showering and preparing a meal. The baby was asleep in the blue room, and I was hungry, but the scent of my own body, sour breast milk mixed with apricot baby oil, was causing me to lose my appetite. I decided on a shower.

I closed and locked the bathroom door out of habit, stripping and stepping under the hot water. My eyes closed, and I guiltily enjoyed the brief moment of solitude. Picking up a bar of soap, I heard a high-pitched wail. It was muffled by the locked door but piercing all the same. Inhaling, I continued to soap my body. Just one minute, I thought. Just a quick shower and I’ll be back. Hold on.

But the baby couldn’t hold on. Her cry picked up both pitch and volume, and came around moments of quiet, desperate gasping. I began to shampoo my hair with frantic speed and let the water run into my ears, attempting to block out the sound. It didn’t work. I had a strange sensation that I could have walked down the stairs, out the door, and across the city, and I still would have been able to hear her, that her cry was connected to my body through more than the physical waves of sound. She needed me, craved me like hunger, and the hunger spread from her body into my own.

Giving in to the sound, I jumped out of the shower, suds clinging to my hair and running in white rivers down my legs. I ran across the living room and reached into the blue room, picking up the rigid, screaming baby. I pressed her to my soapy breast. She opened her mouth and gasped and choked and sucked and repeated it all two or three times before she calmed down enough to nurse. In the shower, the water flowed into the empty ceramic tub and down the drain.

I slid down the wall and sat in the puddle at my feet. If I had owned a clean towel, I might have retrieved it. But there weren’t any, and there wouldn’t be any for a long time. I was no Marlena. I couldn’t carry the baby and a bag of laundry up the hill, pressing quarters into vibrating machines with a hungry mouth on my exposed breast. I wished I had thought about the laundry before the baby was born.

I wished I had thought of a lot of things, now that it was too late. I should have bought diapers, and groceries, and baby clothes. I should have gathered the take-out menus of every restaurant on the hill and memorized the number of a delivery service. I should have found a daycare, or a nanny, or both. I should have bought a stack of parenting books and read every one. I should have decided on a name.

I couldn’t do any of that now.

The baby and I would use dirty towels, sleep on dirty sheets, and wear dirty clothes. The idea of doing anything other than nursing and trying to nourish my own body was too overwhelming to consider.

We survived Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, alone except for a brief food drop from Renata. It was spring; business was picking up, and Renata had never replaced me. Marlena called to tell me she was taking the month to visit relatives in Southern California. She would be back, she said, in time for our April engagements. The phone did not ring again.

On Thursday the baby ate all day. She awoke for her first feeding just after six in the morning and nursed continuously, falling asleep mid-suck every half-hour. If I attempted to remove her from my breast, she startled awake with a deafening shriek. She would sleep only with her face pressed against my naked skin, and when I tried to set her down, no matter how deep in sleep she appeared, she would cry out for more milk.

I resigned myself to my own hunger, spending the morning listening to the sounds of spring enter the apartment through the open kitchen window. Birds, brakes, an airplane, a school bell. I stroked the baby’s soft shoulder as she slept, and told myself that physical hunger was a reasonable sacrifice to make for a baby as beautiful as she. But as the day progressed, the hunger traveled from my stomach to my brain. I began to hallucinate, not sights but smells: phantom meatballs, a sauce simmering, and something dark chocolate baking.

By mid-afternoon I had convinced myself of the existence of a multi-course meal in my kitchen. I climbed out of the blue room with the baby still attached to my breast. When I saw the stove turned off, the burners bare, and the oven empty, I almost cried. I placed the baby on the kitchen counter and patted her distractedly while searching for something to eat. At the back of the cupboard I found a can of soup. The baby whimpered and started to cry. The sound weakened the muscles in my hands until it was impossible for me to turn the dial of the can opener. Giving up halfway around the can, I pried the lid back with a spoon and drank the soup cold, without pausing for breath. When it was empty, I threw the aluminum can into the sink. The baby startled at the loud sound and stopped crying long enough for me to press her face back to my breast. I carried her back to the blue room, my hunger unappeased.

Friday began as Thursday had, except that I was twenty-four hours more exhausted and as hungry as the never-satisfied baby. I ate peanuts in bed while the baby nursed. Mother Ruby had warned me that the baby would go through growth spurts, and I comforted myself with this thought. The end must be growing near. I didn’t have much more to give her, I thought, slipping my finger under the flap of skin that had once been a round, full breast.

At noon I pulled the sleeping baby away from my chest and saw that her lips were red. My nipples were dry and had cracked under the constant suction. The baby was drinking my blood as well as my milk; no wonder I was exhausted. Soon there would be nothing left of me. I eased her gently onto the bed, praying that just this once, she would stay asleep. There was one tray of Marlena’s cooking left in the freezer.

But the baby awoke as I set her down, lifting her chin toward my sore nipple. I sighed. She couldn’t possibly still be hungry, but I picked her back up and let her attempt to extract more milk from my deflated chest.

The baby sucked only two or three times before falling back asleep, her mouth falling open, but awoke again when I tried to set her down. She made a gurgling, sucking sound and puckered her lips.

I put her back to my breast more forcefully than I had intended. “If you’re hungry, eat,” I said, growing frustrated. “Don’t fall asleep.” The baby grimaced and latched on.

I sighed, regretting my impatient touch.

“That’s good, big girl,” I said, trying out Mother Ruby’s words. They sounded forced and insincere on my tongue. I stroked the baby’s hair, a wispy black tuft growing over her ear.

When she’d fallen back to sleep, I stood up slowly and walked her to the Moses basket. Perhaps she would find comfort in the small, padded enclosure, I thought, lowering her a centimeter at a time. I had succeeded in putting her down but had not even withdrawn my arms when she started crying again.

Standing above her, I listened to her cry. I needed to eat. My grasp on reality was slipping with each additional empty-stomached hour, but I couldn’t stand the sound of her wail. Good mothers did not let their babies cry. Good mothers put the needs of their babies first, and I wanted, more than anything, to be a good mother. It would make up for all the harm I had caused, if I could do something right, just this once, for another person.

Picking her up, I walked the length of the room and back again. My nipples needed a rest. I hummed and jiggled and paced as I had seen Marlena do, but the baby wouldn’t be calmed. She twisted her face from side to side and began to suck in the cool oxygen, searching. I sat on the couch and pressed a soft, round pillow against her cheek. She was not fooled. She began to cry harder, sucking air and choking and stretching her short arms over her head. She could not possibly be hungry, I told myself again; she didn’t need to eat.

The baby’s face turned as red as the blood still leaking from my nipple. Walking over to the Moses basket, I set her inside.

In the kitchen, I banged my fists on the tile counter. I was hungry; the baby was not. I needed to take care of myself. I needed her to wait just an hour, while I filled my stomach and rested my nipples. From across the room, I could see her face, now near purple with desperation. She wanted me; she didn’t understand that my body was not her own.

I walked out of the room, away from the noise, and stood at Natalya’s window. I couldn’t bring her to my breast. Not after nursing for nearly thirty-six hours straight. She had consumed all my milk, I was sure, and had moved on to something deeper, more precious, something connected to my heart or nervous system. She wouldn’t be satisfied until she had devoured all of me, until she had sucked every fluid, thought, and emotion from me. I would be an empty shell, incoherent, and she would still be hungry.

No, I decided, she couldn’t have any more. Mother Ruby would not be back until the next day, and there was no sign of Renata. I would go to the store for formula and feed her with a bottle until my nipples healed. I would leave her in her basket and run the whole way to the market and back. Bringing her to the grocery store would be too risky. Someone would hear her hungry, brokenhearted wail and understand my incompetence. Someone would take her away from me.

Grabbing my wallet, I sprinted down the stairs before I could change my mind. I ran up a hill and down the other side, not stopping for cars or pedestrians. I passed everyone. My body, still healing from the birth, felt as if it was splitting in half. A fire burned from between my legs and spread up my spinal cord to the back of my neck, but still I ran. I would be back before the baby even knew I was gone, I told myself. I would feed her a bottle in my arms, and she would finally, after days of nursing, be full.

The light was red at the busy intersection of 17th and Potrero. I stopped running and waited. Catching my breath, I watched the cars and pedestrians hurry in all directions. I heard a driver honk and swear, a teenager on an orange Schwinn singing something loud and cheerful, and a dog on a short leash growling at a brazen pigeon. But I did not hear my daughter. Even though I was blocks from the apartment, I was surprised. Our separation was simple and shockingly complete.

My heart regained its normal rhythm. I watched the light turn green, then red, then green again. The world continued its patterns, busy and oblivious to the crying baby six blocks away, the baby I had birthed but whose cries I could no longer hear. The neighborhood existed as it had a week ago and two weeks before that, as if nothing at all had changed. The fact that my life had turned upside down did not matter to anyone, and out on the sidewalk, removed from the source of the upheaval, my panic seemed unwarranted. The baby was fine. She was well fed and could wait.

I crossed at the next green light and walked slowly to the market. I bought six cans of formula, trail mix, a half-gallon of orange juice, and a turkey sandwich from the deli. Walking the long way home, I devoured fistfuls of almonds and raisins. My breasts filled and began to leak. I would let her nurse one last time, I thought, tenderness seeping into the space I had created between us.

I walked inside and up the stairs. The apartment was silent and looked empty, and for one moment it was easy to imagine I was coming home after delivering flowers for a shower and a nap, alone. My steps were silent on the carpet, but the baby awoke anyway, as if she could sense my presence. She began to cry.

I lifted her out of the basket, and we settled onto the couch, the baby attempting to nurse through the thin soaked cotton of my T-shirt. I pulled my shirt up, and she began to suck. Her wrinkled hands squeezed my outstretched finger as she latched on, the fact of my nipple in her mouth not enough to prove my return. As she nursed, I ate the turkey sandwich. A thin sliver of turkey escaped from my mouth and landed on her temple, rising and falling with her frantic suck. I leaned over, eating the turkey right off her face and kissing her at the same time. She opened her eyes and looked into mine. Where I expected anger or fear, I saw only relief.

I would not leave her again.

10.

It was dark when I returned to Elizabeth’s.

From the dull glow of the upstairs windows, I imagined her sitting at my desk, heavy textbooks open before her, waiting. I had never missed dinner; she would be worried. Hiding the heavy canvas bag under the back porch steps, I walked inside. The screen door squeaked when I opened it.

“Victoria?” Elizabeth called down the stairs.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m home.”

11.

Mother Ruby returned on Saturday, as she had promised she would. She sat down on the floor outside the blue room. I turned my face away. The weight of what I had done tormented me, and I was sure Mother Ruby would know. A woman who traveled to a neighborhood for a birth before being called would know when a baby was in danger. I waited for the accusation.

“Give me that baby, Victoria,” she said, confirming my fears. “Come on, hand her over.”

I slipped my pinkie finger between my nipple and the baby’s gums as Mother Ruby had taught me to do. The suction released. I rubbed the baby’s mouth with my thumb in an attempt to remove the dried blood from her upper lip but was unsuccessful. I passed the bundle over my shoulder without turning around.

Mother Ruby breathed her in. “Oh, big girl,” she said. “I’ve been missing you.”

I waited for Mother Ruby to stand up and walk out the door, taking my daughter with her, but I heard only the sound of the springy scale. “Twelve ounces!” came Mother Ruby’s elated voice. “Have you been eating your mama alive?”

“Pretty much,” I murmured. My words soaked into the walls, unheard.

“You come out of there, Victoria,” Mother Ruby said. “Let me rub your feet or cook you a grilled cheese sandwich. You must be exhausted caring for this baby like you have.” I didn’t move. I didn’t deserve her praise.

Mother Ruby reached in and began to stroke my forehead. “Don’t make me come in there,” she said, “because you know I will.”

Yes, I knew she would. The formula I had purchased was at my feet, still in the bag, evidence of my crime. I kicked it farther into the corner, rolled over, and crawled out feetfirst. Sitting on the couch, I waited for Mother Ruby to see the truth. But she didn’t look at my face. She lifted my shirt and rubbed something from a lavender tube onto my cracked nipples. It was cooling and numbed the stinging pain.

“Keep this,” Mother Ruby said, closing my palm around the tube. She turned my chin and looked into my eyes, my guilty, drowning eyes. “Are you sleeping?” she asked.

I considered the previous night. After finishing the sandwich, the baby and I had gone straight to the blue room, where she reattached herself to my body and closed her eyes. She sucked and swallowed and slept in an excruciating rhythm, and I let her, accepting the pain as punishment. I did not sleep.

“Yeah,” I lied, “pretty well.”

“Good,” she said. “Your daughter is thriving. I’m so proud of you.”

I looked out the window and did not respond.

“Are you hungry?” Mother Ruby asked. “Are you getting enough help? Do you want me to make you something before I leave?” I was starving, but I couldn’t take another compliment. I shook my head.

Mother Ruby handed the baby back to me and put away her scale. “Okay, then,” she said. Her eyes were on my face, studying me as if for clues, and I strained my neck away. I didn’t want her to see me.

She stood to go, and I jumped up to follow. Suddenly, I was not afraid she would look into my face and see my trespass; it was more terrifying to think of her leaving in oblivion, without knowing what I had done, without doing something to stop me from doing it again. But Mother Ruby only smiled and leaned in to kiss my cheek before walking away.

I wanted to tell her, to come clean and beg forgiveness, but I didn’t know what to say. “It’s hard,” was all I could manage, my whisper directed at her back as she descended the stairs. It wasn’t enough.

“I know, love,” Mother Ruby said. “But you’re doing it. It’s in you to be a mother, a good one.” She walked down the stairs.

No, it isn’t in me, I thought bitterly. I wanted to tell her that I had never loved anyone, and ask her to explain how a woman incapable of giving love could ever be expected to be a mother, a good one. But even as I thought the words, I knew they were not the truth. I had loved, more than once. I just hadn’t recognized the emotion for what it was until I had done everything within my power to destroy it.

Mother Ruby stopped when she reached the bottom of the stairs and turned around. She looked small and ignorant, and my reliance on her felt misplaced. She was an intrusive old woman, I thought, nothing else. A switch flipped inside me, and I felt the return of the angry child I had once been. I wanted only for Mother Ruby to leave.

“Name?” she called up to where I stood. “Does that big girl have a name yet?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“It’ll come to you,” she said.

“No,” I said harshly, “it won’t.”

But Mother Ruby had already walked out the door.

After Mother Ruby left, I set the baby in her Moses basket, and through a small miracle she slept peacefully for most of the afternoon. I took a long, hot shower. My body was filled with a palpable despair—a numb, tingling sensation—and I scrubbed my limbs as if the irritation was external and could be washed down the drain. When I got out of the shower, my skin was pink and scraped red in patches. The despair had moved to a deeper, quieter place. I pretended I was clean and renewed, ignoring its low, persistent buzz. Dressing in loose pants and a sweatshirt, I rubbed the cream from the lavender tube on the patches of raw skin on my arms and legs.

I poured myself a glass of orange juice and sat on the floor, looking into the baby’s basket. When she awoke, I would nurse her, and when she was done eating, we would go for a walk. I would carry the basket down the stairs and out the door, and the fresh air would be good for us both. Maybe I would carry her up to McKinley Square and give her a lesson in the language of flowers. She wouldn’t respond, but she would understand. She had the kind of eyes, when they were open, that made me believe she understood everything I said and much of what went unspoken. They were deep, mysterious eyes, as if she was still connected to the place from which she had come.

The longer the baby slept, the more the despair subsided until I could almost make myself believe I had overcome its gravity. Perhaps my brief escape to the grocery store had not caused permanent damage, and I was, as Mother Ruby insisted, capable of the task before me. It was unrealistic to think I could make a clean break from the way I had lived for nineteen years. There would be setbacks. I had spent my life being hateful and solitary, and I could not, overnight, become loving and attached.

Lying down on the floor next to the baby, I breathed in the damp-straw smell of the basket. I would sleep. But before I had closed my eyes, her rhythmic breathing was replaced by the familiar sound of her open, searching mouth.

I peered into the basket, and she looked at me, her eyes wide open, her mouth moving. She had given me an opportunity to sleep, and I had wasted it. There would not be another for hours, if not days. I picked her up. My eyes welled, and when her jaw clamped down, the tears leaked onto my cheeks. I brushed them away with the back of my hand. The relentless suction on my breast pulled the despair up from wherever it was that it had receded, whistling forth like the quiet roar of a conch shell, a reflection of something greater.

The baby nursed for an eternity. Transferring her from one side to the other, I checked my watch. It had been a full hour, and she was only half done. My sigh became a low moan as she latched on again.

When she finally fell asleep, I tried to replace my nipple, still tight between her lips, with my pinkie finger, but she cracked her tired eyes open and began to grunt in complaint.

“Well, I’m done,” I said. “I need a break.” I set her on the couch and stretched. Her grunts became a series of soft cries. I sighed. I knew what she wanted, and I knew how to give it to her. It seemed like it should be so simple. Maybe it was simple for other mothers, but it wasn’t for me. I had handled her touch for hours, for days, for weeks, and I needed just a few moments to myself. As I walked to the kitchen, she began to cry harder. The sound pulled me back.

I sat down and picked her up.

“Five more minutes,” I said, “and then we’re leaving. You don’t need any more.”

But when I placed her in the basket five minutes later, she cried as if I was sending her downriver, as if she would never see me again.

“What do you want?” I asked, the despair in my voice bordering on anger. I tried to jiggle the basket like Marlena had done, but when I shook it, she bounced and cried harder.

“You can’t be hungry,” I pleaded, leaning close to her small ear so that she could hear me over the sound of her own cry. She turned her face to mine and tried to attach herself to my nose. A hysterical sound escaped my body; a snorting that would have been mistaken for a laugh by an observer unaware of my approaching implosion.

“Fine,” I said. “Here.” I lifted my shirt and forced her onto my breast. She struggled to open her mouth against the pressure of my hand. When she finally got it open, she stopped crying and began to suck.

“This is it,” I told her. “You better enjoy it.” My words were threatening, and I listened to them as if they were coming from someone else.

Still nursing, I held on to the baby with one hand and crawled into the blue room, reaching in for the bag of formula and dumping it out. Six cans scattered on the floor. I reached to pick one up, and the baby lost her hold on my nipple. She began her heartbroken wail.

“I’m right here,” I said as I crossed the room and set her on the kitchen counter, but my words didn’t comfort either of us. The baby writhed on the countertop as I poured the can of formula into a bottle and screwed on the lid. Resting the plastic nipple against the baby’s lips, I waited for her to open her mouth. When she didn’t, I opened her lips with my fingers and forced the nipple inside. She gagged.

I took a breath and tried to calm myself. Carrying the baby and the bottle to the couch, I sat down and adjusted her position until her head was tucked into my elbow. I kissed her between the eyebrows. She tried to latch on to my nose again, and I slipped the bottle into her open mouth. She sucked once and then turned away, the formula dribbling out of the side of her mouth. She began to scream.

“Then you aren’t hungry,” I told her, setting the bottle down too hard next to me. A thin stream of liquid shot out the top. “If you won’t eat this, you aren’t hungry.”

I set her back in the basket gently. I would let her cry for two or three minutes, just to prove I was serious. When I picked her up again, she would take the bottle. She had to.

But she didn’t. I let her cry another five minutes, and then another ten. I tried holding her. I tried feeding her in the basket. I tried laying her on my featherbed and reaching inside with the bottle, but still she refused to suck. Finally I gave up and closed the half-door. The baby cried out in the darkness of the blue room, alone.

Lying down on the living room floor, my eyes closed involuntarily. The sound of the cry became something distant and unpleasant but no longer overwhelming. For stretches I forgot the source of the sound or why I had tried to stop it. It passed over my body, leaving me untouched. The fog of my exhaustion was impenetrable.

It wasn’t until the crying stopped that I jolted awake. I felt a rush of fear that I had killed the baby. It was dark outside. I had no idea how much time had passed. Perhaps hours without food and a room without light was enough to kill a newborn. I knew so little about newborns, about children, about human beings. It felt like a horrible joke to leave me alone with a baby, responsible for another life. I threw open the door to the blue room, but before I could even reach out to feel for her pulse, she began to cry.

My body was flooded with emotion, relief but also undeniable disappointment, followed immediately by shame. I held the baby to my body, kissing her head in an attempt to mask the desperation I could no longer bury. I stuck the bottle in the baby’s mouth. She would learn to drink formula. Breast-feeding was too much for me. I would never be able to maintain it, and if I wanted to keep the baby, I needed to find a way to be a mother that I could handle. This time the baby tried to suck, but her lips were weak with hunger and the plastic was stiff and unresponsive.

The nipple must be defective. It was the clear explanation for my baby’s stubborn refusal. Of the hundreds on the shelf, I had purchased the cheapest. I hurled the bottle into the kitchen, and it bounced off the wall and onto the floor. The baby began to cry.

I set her in the basket and walked away. My breasts were full and dripping onto the stained office carpet, but I would not give her milk from my body. It was too much. I would get her a new bottle, and she would take it. My panic would subside.

I took the steps two at a time, her cry growing louder as the distance between us increased. Running out onto the sidewalk, I sprinted the block faster than I ever had in my life. I crossed streets recklessly, running in the same direction I had to buy the formula just the day before. But when I got to Vermont Street, I turned left instead of right. I didn’t think about where I was going, and I did not stop running until I reached the steps of McKinley Square. Digging heavy feet into the mowed lawn, I fell into the white verbena, rolling into my cavern beneath the heath and closing my eyes. I would give myself five minutes. Just five minutes in the park, and when I returned to the baby, I would be able to handle it. I covered my head with my arm, searching in the darkness for the brown wool blanket that wasn’t there. Sleep pulled me under again, and I was protected, rocked, comforted. There was nothing but the darkness, the solitude, and the white petals of the verbena praying for me and for the child I wouldn’t let myself remember.

12.

“I missed you today,” Elizabeth said when I walked into the room.

She didn’t ask where I’d been, and I didn’t offer an explanation. I crawled into bed, pulling the covers up over my head and rolling onto my side, my back to the desk where she sat.

“I love you, Victoria,” she said quietly. “I hope you know that.” The first time she’d declared her love, I’d believed her. Now her words ran over my heart like water over a stone. The desk chair scraped against the wood floor as she stood, and I felt the mattress dip as she moved to the edge of the bed. She placed one hand on my shoulder.

“What did she do?” I asked.

The question was sudden and unplanned, and I felt Elizabeth’s body flinch. She was quiet for a long time. Finally, she lay down on her back next to me.

“I loved a man, once,” she said simply. “It was a long time ago. He was English, here for an internship with one of the bigger wineries, just a few miles up the road. I was happier than I’d ever been. And then Catherine—my sister, my best friend—took him away from me.”

Elizabeth rolled onto her side and draped her arm over my body. I stiffened but did not protest, waiting for her to continue. “A year later, Grant was born. For years I couldn’t look at him without remembering his father, without replaying in my mind everything I’d lost. But his father was gone; I don’t know if he ever knew Catherine was pregnant. She raised Grant completely alone.”

Elizabeth inched closer until her bent legs tucked into the space behind my kneecaps. When she spoke next, her face was pressed into the blanket covering the top of my head so that I had to strain to hear her words.

“I had a chance to forgive her,” she whispered. “Once, when Grant was still a baby, Catherine approached me at the farmers’ market. She apologized, crying, and told me how much she missed me. It was my chance to have her back in my life, but instead I turned her away. I shouldn’t have done it. I said awful things, things that keep me up at night.”

She deserved it, I thought. Catherine deserved everything Elizabeth had said and more. The idea that Elizabeth was about to move in to the home of the woman who had betrayed her made my chest fill with rage. I took a deep breath, willing myself to be patient.

For what seemed like hours, I waited for Elizabeth to speak, tense in her gentle grasp. But she was quiet, her story complete. Just as I began to worry that she had fallen asleep, she stood up and tiptoed out of the room. The faucet in the bathroom sink turned on and off, the toilet flushed, her bedroom door closed, and then all was quiet. I slipped out of bed.

Downstairs, I sneaked through the kitchen and out the back door. The canvas bag was underneath the steps where I had stashed it, full and heavy. I picked it up and hugged it to my chest. Inside, the glass jars clattered and resettled.

I had decided earlier, crouched in the ditch, exactly where I would go, and I walked quickly in the direction of the road. There was no moon, but the stars illuminated the property as I walked to the northeast corner. Here, wedged between the concrete of the farmers’ market and the highway, the grapes were dusty and constantly dry. In the fall, they remained sour long after the other acres had ripened.

I unscrewed the lid of the first jam jar. Lighter fluid seeped over the edges and spiraled through the ridges at the lip of the glass. Slowly, I emptied it onto the trunk of the vine, holding the jar away from my body, so the fluid wouldn’t run back to my bare toes. When the first jar was empty, I opened the second, moving down the row. The bag felt bottomless, and I began to move quickly, sloppily, the lighter fluid a wild spray from my hands to the vines. When I reached the end of the row, I retraced my steps, picking up the empty jars that littered the ground.

On the top porch step—in the same place Elizabeth and I had once sat, stringing chamomile—I lined up the jam jars, one after the other, and then went into the kitchen for matches.

I started back toward the road, looking for the wet trail. It ended by the driveway. I stepped back. Holding a fistful of matches together, I struck them on the wide, sandpapery strip of the box. One lit, and the others followed in a rush, until I held a flickering, glowing orb. The flame descended toward the tips of my fingers, and I waited until the heat grew uncomfortable, and then painful, before flicking it onto the ground.

There was a pause, and then a rushing noise—like a river, tumbling—followed by a quick series of loud pops. Then the heat. Turning, I ran toward the house, as I had planned, for a pot of water. But the fire was faster than I was. Looking over my shoulder, I saw the flames fleeing away from me, following an invisible trail through the brush and vines. I had expected the fire to be contained to the trunks of the vines I’d soaked, to flicker there until I ran inside for buckets of water, but the fire didn’t wait.

I leapt up the steps three at a time, racing into the kitchen. Replacing the matches, I screamed for Elizabeth. She rose immediately. I heard her thumping into my bedroom, calling my name.

“Downstairs!” I yelled. I was at the sink, filling a soup pot with water. The pipes of the old house clanked, and water emerged slowly, in breathy waves.

Clutching the full pot, I crossed the kitchen at the same moment Elizabeth descended the stairs, and we turned, shoulder to shoulder, our gaze drawn to the light.

The sky was purple. The stars were gone. As we watched, the fire dipped into the roadside ditch, a quarter-mile of dry thistle igniting in a single moment. The wall of flames that rose seemed to climb halfway to the sky. Beyond it, the surrounding properties disappeared, leaving Elizabeth and I completely alone.

Like electricity on wires, the fire spread in lines across the vineyard.

13.

I awoke when the sun rose. My body was sore, my cheek textured with the imprint of the forest. I’d slept six hours, maybe seven. Pushing up into a sitting position, I adjusted myself away from the two circular puddles under the heath.

The city was waking up. Engines sputtered to life, brakes screeched, birds sang. On the street below me, a school-age girl stepped off a bus. She was alone and walked quickly down the street, a bouquet of flowers in her hands. I couldn’t see what she carried.

I exhaled. I wanted more than anything to be that girl, to be a child again and carry crocus or hawthorn or larkspur instead of buckets of thistle. I wanted to search the North Bay until I found Elizabeth, and apologize, and beg forgiveness. I wanted to start my life over, on a course that would not lead to this moment, this waking up alone in a city park, my own daughter alone in an empty apartment building. Every decision I’d ever made had led me here, and I wanted to take it all back, the hatred and the blame and the violence. I wanted to have lunch with my angry ten-year-old self, to warn her of this morning and give her the flowers to point her in a different direction.

But I couldn’t go back. There was only now: this forest within a city and my own daughter, waiting. The thought filled me with dread. I did not know what I would find when I returned to the apartment. I did not know if she still screamed, or if time, solitude, and hunger had collapsed my daughter’s lungs as completely as a rising tide.

I had failed my daughter. Less than three weeks after giving birth and making promises to us both, I had failed, and failed again. The cycle would continue. Promises and failures, mothers and daughters, indefinitely.

14.

My arms began to shake violently, water from the soup pot sloshing onto Elizabeth. The cold spray snapped her into action. She ran to the phone in the kitchen as I sprinted out the front door, tripping over the jam jars as I flew down the steps.

The water in the pot was not enough to save even one vine. Looking at the fire, I knew this. Yet I had to try. Acres burned, the heat dizzying. Everything Elizabeth had spent her life cultivating would be gone if I did not act. She would be left on scorched earth, homeless and alone. I had to put it out. If I didn’t, I would never be able to look at her again.

Halfway to the road, I launched the water on a row of burning vines. If there was a sizzle, if even one flame surrendered, I didn’t hear or see it. Up close, the roar of the fire was deafening, the smell of the smoke sugary. The scent reminded me of Elizabeth caramelizing apples, and I realized the sweet smell came from the grapes, the perfectly ripe grapes, charring.

From the porch, Elizabeth called me. I turned. In her glassy, helpless eyes the fire reflected. She clutched one hand over her mouth and the other over her heart. I turned away, the enormity of my error as thick as the smoke in my lungs. That I hadn’t meant to cause so much damage didn’t matter. That I had done it only to stay with her, because I loved her, would never matter. I had to put out the fire. If I didn’t, I would lose everything.

Without making a conscious decision to do so, I ripped off my nightgown and began swatting at the flames, trying to suffocate them. The thin cotton, splattered with lighter fluid, exploded in my hands. Elizabeth ran toward me, frantic. She yelled at me to back away from the fire, but I continued flapping my flaming nightgown around my head wildly. Sparks flew from the scorched material, so that Elizabeth had to duck under them as she ran to me.

“Are you out of your mind?” Elizabeth screamed. “Get back to the house!”

I stepped closer to the fire, the heat intense and threatening. A stray spark singed my hair, traveling up a cluster of strands and melting into my scalp. Elizabeth slapped at my smoldering hairline, and the sting of the slap felt good, deserved.

“I’m putting it out!” I screamed. “Leave me alone!”

“With what?” Elizabeth demanded. “Your bare hands? The fire trucks are coming. You’ll get killed standing here like an idiot, waving your hands in the air.”

Still, I didn’t back away. The flames leapt closer to where I stood.

“Victoria,” Elizabeth said. She had stopped screaming, and her wide eyes filled. I strained to hear the words she uttered over the roar of the fire. “I’m not losing my vineyard and my daughter on the same night. I won’t.” When I didn’t move, she lunged at me, grabbing me by the shoulders, shaking me. “Do you hear me?” she shouted. “I won’t!” I wriggled free from her hands, and she caught me by one arm, pulling me toward the house. As I fought, she pulled harder, and I felt my shoulder pop out of the socket. She yelped and let go. Collapsing onto the ground, I pulled my knees in to my bare chest. The fire circled me like a blanket, and through the heat I heard the faraway sound of the trailer door slamming. Elizabeth screamed for me to get up, pulled at my feet, and kicked me in the ribs. When she tried to carry me, I screamed and bit at her like a wild animal.

Finally, she let me be.

15.

The baby was awake in the Moses basket when I returned. Her wide eyes blinked up at the ceiling, and she did not cry out when she saw me. I retrieved her bottle from the kitchen, emptied the day-old formula into the sink, and refilled it with a fresh can. Standing over the baby, I rested it on her lips. She opened her mouth but did not suck. I squeezed the nipple and watched the liquid run in a thin stream down her waiting tongue. She swallowed twice before falling asleep in the basket.

I showered and ate a bowl of cereal on the rooftop. Every time I walked by the baby’s basket, I would pause and study her face, and if she opened her eyes, I would put the bottle to her lips. She learned to suck, slowly, placidly, without the urgent ferocity with which she had once devoured my breast. It took her all day to finish a single can of formula. She did not cry. She did not even whimper.

Before going to bed, I changed her sodden diaper but did not take her out of the basket. She seemed comfortable there, and I was afraid to break the fragile peace we had reached, afraid my panic would return at the sound of her first scream. Instead, I moved her basket to the couch, where we settled into a square of moonlight. I offered her a fresh bottle, and her lips formed a perfect circle around the amber-colored plastic. Tiny bubbles ran the length of the bottle as she persuaded water, iron, calcium, and protein through microscopic holes. Her eyes were wider than I had ever seen them, concentric circles and small triangles of white scanning my face. When she was done eating, the rubber nipple slipped from her mouth, and she reached her tiny fingers toward my face. I lowered my head until my nose was only inches from her hands, my eyes looking into hers. She opened and closed her fingers in the empty space between us, squeezing tight.

Before I realized I was crying, a tear dropped from the tip of my chin onto the baby’s cheek. It ran in a thin line to the edge of her mouth, and her red lips puckered in surprise. I laughed, and the tears ran faster. The open forgiveness in her eyes, the uncensored love, terrified me. Like Grant, my daughter deserved so much more than I could give her. I wanted her to carry hawthorn, laugh easily, and love without fear. But I could not give her this, could not teach her what I didn’t know. It would be only a matter of time before my toxicity would taint her perfection. It would leak out of my body, and she would swallow it with the willingness of a ravenous infant. I had hurt every person I had ever known; I wanted, desperately, to save her from the dangers of being my daughter.

I would bring her to Grant in the morning.

He would preserve her goodness and teach her everything she needed to know. Renata was right; Grant deserved to know his daughter. He deserved her sweetness, her beauty, and her unwavering loyalty.

When I pulled my face away, the baby’s eyes were closed. I left the basket on the couch and shut myself in the blue room.

That night I smelled moss, dried leaves, and damp soil in my apartment of plaster and concrete, blocks and blocks from anything green or growing.

In the morning I hurried out of the apartment. Feeding the baby what was left of the formula in the bottle from the night before, I carried her in her basket to my car. She was awake as we drove across the city. She had slept through the night, or, if she hadn’t, she had not cried out. I had slept deeply and without dreams but awoke with the agitated alertness of the overtired. My body ached, my full breasts on fire, and I was hot in the cool morning. I rolled down the windows, and the baby grimaced in the strong wind.

Driving north on the freeway, I crossed the bridge and took the first wooded exit. I didn’t have time to drive to one of the lush state parks, but it wouldn’t matter. It had been a wet spring. I would find what I needed in any dense, shaded forest. I pulled in to a parking lot at a vista point overlooking the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge, which was rust-colored and glowing in the early-morning sun. Already the parking lot was half full with hikers pulling on boots and filling brightly colored plastic bottles with water.

Grabbing the basket by its woven handles, I started down a trailhead. The trail split and split again. I chose the path with the least sun and shuddered as I walked into the cool undergrowth. Hikers passed and cooed over the baby until I turned off the main trail and onto one marked Reforestation. Do Not Trespass. I lifted the basket over the thin chain and dropped out of sight into a circle of redwoods.

The baby didn’t make a sound as I lay her down on the forest floor, the bald patch on the back of her head pressing against the soft duff. She looked up through the redwoods, her blurred, blue-eyed vision scanning the tall trees, patches of light, gray sky, and perhaps even what lay beyond it. I didn’t doubt her.

I pulled out the large, flat putty knife I had stuck in the back pocket of my jeans and began to strip the spongy green moss from the trunks of the redwood trees. The moss fell to the ground in long, hairy patches, and I arranged them carefully around the bottom and sides of the basket, making sure the softest and most fragrant pieces would surround her tiny head.

When the basket was completely covered, I put the knife back in my pocket, picked up the baby, who had fallen asleep, and lay her down gently on the blanket of moss.

Maternal love.

It was all I could give her. Someday, I hoped, she would understand.* * *

The spare key to Grant’s door was where it had always been, inside the rusted tin watering can on the front stoop. I unlocked the door and carried the moss-lined basket into the kitchen, setting it down beside the spiral staircase in the corner of the room. From where the baby lay, she could look up three stories, and it seemed to amuse her well enough. She continued her quiet squinting while I moved about the kitchen, lighting the stove with a match and filling a kettle with water for tea. It had been nearly a year since I’d made tea in this kitchen, but everything was exactly as it had been before.

I sat down at the table while I waited for the water to boil. The baby was so quiet it was easy to forget her, easy to imagine I had returned only to surprise Grant with a cup of tea at the splintering table. I missed him. Sitting in his water tower, looking out over his flower farm, the feeling was impossible to ignore. And soon I would miss the baby. I pushed the thought from my mind and kept my focus on the flowers stretching across the fields below.

The baby made a sound between a sigh and a squawk just as the water started to boil. Steam clouded the kitchen window. I wondered if she could drink peppermint tea. It seemed like it might be good for her stomach, soothing, and I had brought the near-empty bottle but forgotten a can of formula. Dumping the congealing liquid down the drain, I rinsed the bottle and filled half with boiling water, half with tap water. I dropped in a tea bag and screwed on the top. The baby’s nose wrinkled in surprise as she tasted the tea, but her lips worked the nipple hungrily and without complaint. Steam from the still-boiling water settled down on us. The moss glowed greener from the moisture in the air.

I balanced the bottle against the side of the basket so the baby could suck while I filled a soup pot with water and lit another burner. I wanted the moss to live for as long as possible. As the baby sucked, the water tower filled with hot, billowing steam. I carried the basket up the two flights of stairs to Grant’s bed. The baby was asleep by the time I got to the top—a deep, motionless sleep that made me nervous about my choice of nourishment. Setting the basket down in the middle of the foam mattress, I lay down next to her, lowering my face until I could feel her quick exhales on my upper lip.

I stayed there—our noses nearly touching, our exhales joined—until the sun was dangerously high in the sky and Grant’s arrival was imminent. Closing my eyes, I withdrew my face. The baby made the air-sucking whimper I remembered from the release of my nipple from her mouth, and my breasts ached with the memory. I pulled a small square of moss off the edge of the basket and rubbed it against her cheek, her chin, and tucked it into the crease where her neck would be, someday, when she was strong enough to lift her head. The moss pulsed with the beating of her heart.

Pulling myself away, I walked down the stairs. The pot on the stove was almost empty. I filled it to the brim, returned it to the stove, and slipped silently out the door.

My hatchback skidded down the long dirt driveway, and I continued toward the highway without looking back. What had started as a dull, dislocated ache had become centralized in my left breast. When I touched the nipple, a pain shot through my flesh and down my spine. I started to sweat. The windows were down, and I turned on the air-conditioning as well, but still I was hot. Glancing in the rearview mirror, I saw the empty seat where the baby had been. There was nothing but a thin spray of dirt and a single hair-fine coil of bright green moss.

I turned on the radio and spun the dial until I found something loud and vibrating, too many cymbals and a voice without words. It reminded me of Natalya’s band. I drove faster, flying over the bridge and through intersections, neither red nor yellow lights slowing me down. I needed the blue room. I needed to lie down and close my eyes and sleep. I wouldn’t emerge for a week, if I emerged at all.

Screeching to a stop in front of the apartment, I came bumper to bumper with Natalya’s car. The trunk was open. Boxes and suitcases were stacked on the sidewalk. It was hard to tell if she was coming or going. I got out of the car quietly, hoping I could slip inside the blue room and lock all the locks without her noticing.

I tiptoed across the empty office space and nearly collided with Natalya at the bottom of the stairs. She did not step aside. I looked up and could tell by her expression that my face looked as hot as it felt.

“You all right?” Natalya asked. I nodded and tried to get by, but still she did not move. “Your face is pinker than my hair.”

She reached out, touching my forehead, and recoiled as if she’d been burned. I pushed past her but tripped and fell on the bottom step. I didn’t even try to stand but crawled on my hands and knees up the stairs. Natalya followed. Collapsing into the blue room, I pulled the door closed behind me.

Natalya tapped on the half-door. “I have to leave,” she said, her voice a whisper, full of fear. “Our tour has been extended—I’ll be gone for six months at least. I just came to get some things and tell you to use my bedroom if you want.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I really have to go,” she said again.

“So go already,” I managed to say.

Something loud hit the door, likely Natalya’s foot. “I don’t want to return in six months to the smell of your rotting corpse,” she said, kicking the door again. The next thing I heard was the sound of her shoes stomping down the stairs and a car door slamming. The engine of her car sputtered and started. Then she was gone.

Would she call her mother? I wondered. Would she realize the baby was gone, and report me to the authorities? If she was going to call someone, I hoped she decided on the police; I’d rather do time than face Mother Ruby and her disappointment.

I lay on my left side on the featherbed, the hard rubber ball of my breast supported by the mattress. My body, which did not feel like my own, shook uncontrollably. I was freezing. I put on every sweatshirt I owned and pulled up the brown blanket. When that didn’t warm me, I crawled underneath the featherbed. I stayed there, barely able to breathe, my body and mind an ice storm under a heavy cloud. My chill became something black and swirling, and I had the fleeting, comforting thought that the sleep I was entering was eternal, a state from which I might never return.

From far away, sirens whirled, growing louder, nearer, until they sounded as if they were coming from Natalya’s bedroom. Flashing lights soaked under my door. And then, just as suddenly, they stopped.

For just a moment the room was black and silent as death; then the door was pushed in and I heard the trampling of feet on the stairs.

16.

I lay in an ambulance, strapped to a white cloth board. I couldn’t remember how I got there. I was still in only my underwear, and someone had draped a hospital gown across my chest.

Beside me, Elizabeth sobbed.

“Are you her mother?” a voice asked. I opened one eye. A young man in a navy uniform sat near my head. Whirling lights shone through the window and flashed across his sweaty face.

“Yes,” Elizabeth said, still crying. “I mean no. Not yet.”

“She’s a ward of the court?” he asked.

Elizabeth nodded.

“You’ll need to report it, then, immediately. Or I will.” The man looked apologetic, and Elizabeth wept harder. He handed her a heavy black phone, connected to the side of the ambulance by a cord that spiraled like the one in Elizabeth’s kitchen. I closed my eyes again. We drove through the night for what felt like hours, and Elizabeth didn’t stop crying.

When the ambulance stopped, hands tucked the hospital gown under my arms. The doors opened. Cool air rushed in, and when I opened my eyes, I saw Meredith, waiting. She was still in her pajamas, a trench coat thrown on over them.

As we passed, she leaned forward, her hand reaching out to pull Elizabeth away from me. “I can take over from here,” she said.

“Don’t touch me,” Elizabeth said. “Don’t you dare touch me.”

“Wait in the lobby.”

“I’m not leaving her,” Elizabeth said.

“You’ll wait in the lobby or I’ll have you escorted out by security,” Meredith said.

I watched over my receding toes as Meredith left Elizabeth standing in the hall, shocked. She followed me into a room.

A nurse examined my body, recording my injuries. I had burns on my scalp and in a ring where the elastic of my cotton underwear had melted into my stomach. A dislocated arm fell limp at my side, and my chest and back were bruised where Elizabeth had kicked. Meredith recorded the nurse’s findings in a notebook.

Elizabeth had hurt me. Not in the way that Meredith believed, but still, she had hurt me. The marks were indisputable evidence. They would be photographed and recorded in my file. No one would ever believe Elizabeth’s story: that she had been trying to save me from running headlong into a raging blaze. Even though it was the truth.

And suddenly I saw, in the markings on my body, an undeniable escape route, a path away from Elizabeth’s pain-filled eyes; a path away from the guilt, the regret, and the scorched vineyard. I could not face the pain I had caused Elizabeth. I would never be able to face it. It wasn’t just the fire; it was a year’s worth of transgressions, many small, some unforgivable. Mothering me had changed her. A year after I’d moved in to her home, she was a different woman, softened in a way that allowed suffering. With me in her life, she would only continue to suffer. She didn’t deserve it. She didn’t deserve any of it.

The nurse walked into the hall. Meredith pulled the door of the small room closed behind her, and we were alone.

“Did she beat you?” she asked.

I bit my bottom lip so hard it split. When I swallowed, it was blood and saliva, both. Meredith stared at me. I took a deep breath. My eyes scanned the holes in the acoustic tile before dropping to answer her question in the only way I could, in the way Meredith expected.

“Yes,” I said.

She left the room.

One word, and it was over. Elizabeth might try to visit, but I would refuse to see her. Meredith and the nurses, believing her to be dangerous, would protect me.

That night, for the first time, I dreamed of fire. Elizabeth hovered above me, wailing. The sound was almost inhuman. I tried to move toward her, but my toes were sealed to the ground, as if my flesh had melted into the earth. She began to shout then, her words blurred with agony. My body was charred black before I understood her to be proclaiming her love for me, over and over again. It was worse than the wailing.

I woke up burning, my body wet with sweat.

17.

I spent three days in the hospital, recovering from mastitis. The paramedics found me with a temperature of 105 degrees. My fever did not break until after a full forty-eight hours of intravenous antibiotics, which, the doctors discussed as I fell in and out of sleep, they had never seen. Mastitis was a common infection for breast-feeding mothers, painful but localized and easily treated. For me, mastitis had become an inflammation of nearly my entire body. Skin boiled on my breasts, but also on my arms, my neck, and the insides of my thighs. The doctors said there were no cases like mine on record.

When the fever subsided, the aching for my daughter replaced the burning. My face, my chest, and my limbs blazed with longing. Worried the doctors would ask questions about a new mother alone in the hospital, with no baby in sight and no visitors, I fled before being released, pulling out my IV and sneaking down a back staircase.

I took a taxi back to the empty apartment and called a locksmith to change the locks. If Natalya returned, I would make her a key. Until then, I didn’t want Mother Ruby or Renata, both of whom had taken to walking in without knocking, stopping by to see the baby. I didn’t have the strength to tell them what I had done.

That very afternoon Mother Ruby came. She knocked until I was sure the glass doors would break. I peeked out the window in Natalya’s room, then returned to the kitchen to take the phone off the hook before crawling into the blue room and closing the door. In the evening it was Renata, who pounded even harder and threw a small stone against the upstairs window. I gave no sign that I had returned. The next morning a different, softer knock woke me from a deep sleep and I knew that Marlena was back. It was time to go back to work. I would tell her the truth.

Stumbling down the stairs, I squinted in the bright light. Marlena burst though the doors. “She must be enormous!” she exclaimed. “What’s her name?” She flew up the stairs, and I followed slowly behind. When I got to the top, Marlena was spinning in a circle in the living room, the emptiness of the apartment settling over her. She looked at me, her eyes holding a single question.

“I don’t know,” I said, answering her spoken question but not her unspoken one. “Her name. I didn’t name her.” Marlena’s eyes did not move from my body, the question they held the same: Where is she?

I started to cry. Marlena came to me, placing a soft hand on my shoulder. I wanted to tell her. I wanted her to know that the baby was safe, and would be loved, and might even be happy.

Minutes passed before I could speak, and when I did, I told the story simply, without embellishment. I left her with her father, who would raise her. I wasn’t able to be the mother I wanted to be. The loss was incapacitating, but I had made the best decision for my daughter.

“Please,” I said when I had finished. “Let’s not talk about her again.” I walked across the room for a box of tissues and my appointment book. I scrawled a short list on a lined sheet of paper and folded it into Marlena’s fingers with enough cash for the purchase. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said. I did not wait for her to leave but crawled into the blue room and locked the door.

The spoken truth rocked me to sleep.

It was not Marlena’s quiet tap that woke me the following morning but Renata’s punctuated pounding. I covered my head with a pillow, but her voice reached me though the feathers.

“I’m not going anywhere, Victoria,” she called up. “I just saw Marlena at the flower market, and I know you’re inside. If you don’t open up, I’ll just sit here until Marlena arrives, and she’ll let me in.”

There was no way to avoid it any longer. I had to face her. Walking downstairs, I unlocked the double glass doors and inched one open.

“What?” I demanded.

“I saw her,” Renata said. “This morning, at the market. I thought you had left with the baby, left without telling any of us where you were going, and then there she was in his arms.”

My eyes filled, and I lifted my shoulders by way of asking what she wanted from me.

“You told him?” Renata asked. “You gave him the baby?”

“I didn’t tell him anything,” I said. “And I don’t want you to tell me anything. Ever.” I swallowed hard.

Renata softened then. “She looked happy,” she said, “and Grant looked tired. But—”

“Please,” I said to Renata as I inched the door closed. “I don’t want to know. I can’t take it.”

I closed and locked the door. Renata and I stood on opposite sides of the glass in silence. The doors were not thick enough to block conversation, but neither of us spoke. Renata looked into my eyes, and I let her. I hoped she could see the longing, the loneliness, and the despair. It was hard enough to let my baby go. It would be harder with constant updates from Renata. She had to understand that the only way I could survive my decision was to try to forget.

Marlena drove up in my car, the hatchback open and flowers spilling out. Midway through unloading, she stopped, examining Renata and me.

“Everything okay?” she asked. Renata looked at me, and I turned my face away.

Renata didn’t answer. She turned up the hill to Bloom, her arms defeated at her sides.